[alsocasey]

Large scale genomics initiatives certainly can be 'Big Data', but with the costs of read generation continuing to decrease, the pipelines described in the paper are going to come into the hands of smaller groups and be applied to smaller studies... the RNA-Seq pipeline described in the paper is anything but big - an experiment with 20x the number of samples can be run on commodity hardware overnight - but it is the type of study a small lab might want to run. And for that type of setup, there's really no need for a large infrastructure setup.

There will be (are in fact) one-click, cloud-hosted solutions for analysis, but given how quickly tools have evolved in this space, there will always be groups wanting to run on their own hardware so as to experiment with the latest new developments.