Virtualization has the potential to dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership of datacenters and increase the flexibility of deployments for general-purpose workloads. If present trends continue, the datacenter of the future will be largely virtualized. The base platform in such a datacenter will consist of physical hosts that run hypervisors, and workloads will run within virtual machines on these platforms. From a system management perspective, the virtualized environment enables a number of new workflows in the datacenter. These workflows involve operations on the physical hosts themselves, such as upgrading the hypervisor, as well as operations on the virtual machines, such as reconfiguration or reverting from snapshots. While traditional datacenter design has focused on the cost vs. capability tradeoffs for the end-user applications running in the datacenter, we argue that the management workload from these workflows must be factored into the design of the virtualized datacenter.

MOTIVATION: Understanding gene regulation and expression is the key to the advancement of biology. EST sequence assembly and analysis provide unique benefits in this regard. We have developed a standalone application, dCAS (Desktop cDNA Annotation System), which performs automated EST cleaning, clustering, assembly and annotation on a desktop computer. Compared with other available tools, dCAS provides a more convenient and user-friendly solution to biologists for extracting biological meaning from sequence data. AVAILABILITY: The dCAS package is distributed freely. A cross-platform installer and associated sequence databases can be downloaded at: http://exon.niaid.nih.gov/applications.html.