I love this quote, thanks. I do try to do things in the cloud as much as possible, but often times it's more practical for TCO reasons to do things locally.
This quote makes me wonder if in the future we'll see some sort of external SSDs with a RasberyPi-like portable GPU hooked up. Some sort of dedicated Storage+Computer USB hybrid.
What I like about our schema/anonymization solution, is you can put fake data and real code online, and then people can make changes to the real code on the cloud, and you can run those reliably on data locally.
That's a very interesting pattern--publishing "fake" (perhaps safe or anonymized) data online along with code to spur research and development then running the enhanced code locally on private (e.g., PII data) on local compute resources.
We hope Quilt packages can play a role to make that easier. The package serves as an interface and layer of abstraction between the code and the data so the same code can be run against the safe or private data.
No. However, I'm helping start the Data Curation Core at the AIPHI here (https://aiphi.shepherdresearchlab.org/). Our intent is to be a one stop shop for all medical data in Hawaii. We don't yet have a plan on where we will actually store the public datasets (have solutions for private data), but it sounds like from what you folks are saying S3 is the place, and we should link to it via Quilt. That sounds like a good plan to me.
On a related topic, we just had a paper accepted ("Maternal Cardiovascular-Related Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, Genes and Pathways Associated with Early-Onset Preeclampsia") with a smaller dataset (in the low TB IIRC) where we were unable to put the data live online publically for privacy reasons, so instead created a strongly typed schema for the data and wrote a method "synthesizeProgram()" to generate fake but correctly typed data so we could publish working code, and other researchers could just swap out the CSVs to get real results. Perhaps that might be a good thing to integrate into Quilt.