  Cloud computing offers on-demand, scalable computing and storage, and has
become an essential resource for the analyses of big biomedical data. The usual
approach to cloud computing requires users to reserve and provision virtual
servers. An emerging alternative is to have the provider allocate machine
resources dynamically. This type of serverless computing has tremendous
potential for biomedical research in terms of ease-of-use, instantaneous
scalability and cost effectiveness. In our proof of concept example, we
demonstrate how serverless computing provides low cost access to hundreds of
CPUs, on demand, with little or no setup. In particular, we illustrate that the
all-against-all pairwise comparison among all unique human proteins can be
accomplished in approximately 2 minutes, at a cost of less than $1, using
Amazon Web Services Lambda. This is a 250x speedup compared to running the same
task on a typical laptop computer.
