[eggie]

If storage is cheap enough, and abstract, we can expect there to be a thriving ecosystem of tools to apply to it. They don't even need to be embedded in a single platform, but could be distributed, streaming, and on-demand.

Here are two examples from the iobio project.

A heads-up display describing a BAM (alignment) file streaming between two remote servers:

http://bam.iobio.io/?bam=http://s3.amazonaws.com/iobio/NA128...

Streams another BAM from the 1000 Genomes project through two variant callers, with dynamically-updated statistics about the results. You can modify the variant quality threshold for each caller and the results are recomputed in real time:

http://iobio.io/demo/variantcomparer/

Edit:

Very nice visualization of interesting statistics from a VCF file, provided by URL or uploaded:

http://vcf.iobio.io/?vcf=http://s3.amazonaws.com/vcf.files/A...