CALL FOR PAPERS
Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience
(www.scpe.org)

Volume 15, Issue 4: Special Issue on CLOUD for Health

In the last 20 years, computational methods and data analysis have become very important part in health systems; especially, in research areas such as biomodelling, genomics, neuroscience, cancer models, medical image analysis, biotechnology, or automatic diagnosis. The development of those areas leads to an unprecedented demand for large-scale data management and analysis (Tbytes or Pbytes) and scalability in computing power.

This new situation requires appropriate IT-infrastructures, where new biomedical challenges can be solved within an acceptable timespan. Cloud computing has the potential to help solving those problems by offering a utility model based on highly flexible computing and storage capabilities and abstraction layers that allow overcoming many of the constraints present in dedicated systems. It may also increase research productivity by allowing sharing applications, tools, and algorithms in an easy way, by increasing the availability of new methods for the research community, and by supporting large-scale multi-centric collaborations.

The aim of this special issue is to promote synergies between cloud computing and health communities by exploring applications developed in clouds, cloud systems enhancements for bio*, and new trends and needs shared between both communities.

Thus, this special issue will feature articles that discuss applications of cloud computing to bioinformatics and biomedicine, including solutions to the problems in the area, and architectural adaptation of cloud systems to fit those problems. The goals are to exchange and discuss existing solutions and latest developments in both fields, and to gather an overview of challenges (technologies, achievements, gaps, roadblocks).

TOPICS

Areas of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:
- Cloud-based bioinformatics and biomedicine applications
- Cloud-based applications in public health systems
- Modeling and simulation of complex biological processes
- Genomics and Molecular Structure evolution
- Clouds for big data manipulation in bioinformatics and biomedicine
- Visualization and analysis of biomedical images
- Integration and analysis of biomedical data
- Interoperability for exchanging data, algorithms and analysis workflows
- Biosignals processing using clouds
- Privacy and security issues for cloud-based health applications
- Data-centric versus computer-centric cloud architectures
- Virtual HPC infrastructures for Health
- Hybrid infrastructures (cloud/physics) for bio applications
- Improved energy consumption of bio applications using clouds
- Programming paradigms and tools for bio-applications

IMPORTANT DATES

- Submission: August 31th, 2014
- Author notification: October 1th 2014
- Camera Ready papers due: November 15th, 2014
- Publication: December, 2014

SUBMISSION DETAILS

The special issue seeks original, unpublished work on potential means to foster better security, transparency and scalability in cloud-based services.

The SCPE journal has a rigorous peer-review process and papers will be send to at least two independent academic referees. Papers that do not merit publication (for any reason) can be rejected by the Special Issue Editors without further review.

Submitted papers must be formatted according to the journal's instructions, which can be found at: http://www.scpe.org/index.php/scpe/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS

- Prof. Jesus Carretero. University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain
- Dr. Javier Garcia-Blas. University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain
- Prof. Sandra Gesing. University of Notre Dame, USA