Gene set analysis in the cloud.

UNLABELLED: Cloud computing offers low cost and highly flexible opportunities in bioinformatics. Its potential has already been demonstrated in high-throughput sequence data analysis. Pathway-based or gene set analysis of expression data has received relatively less attention. We developed a gene set analysis algorithm for biomarker identification in the cloud. The resulting tool, YunBe, is ready to use on Amazon Web Services. Moreover, here we compare its performance to those obtained with desktop and computing cluster solutions. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: YunBe is open-source and freely accessible within the Amazon Elastic MapReduce service at s3n://lrcv-crp-sante/app/yunbe.jar. Source code and user's guidelines can be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/yunbedownload.