Dragen

[GERALD]

When I first heard about Dragen, it sounded interesting but recently Edico has started to make this platform available on AWS, as well as several Bioinformatics-as-a-service platforms, including DNANexus, Seven Bridges and Illumina's BaseSpace:
http://edicogenome.com/dragen-in-the-cloud/

I think we should all be taking a hard look at this for a couple of reasons:

• These platforms bring it to a wide audience and make it user-friendly
• Platform effects: It's a hardware platform with inherent limits on configurability. This will tend to drive users to stadardize on it and effectively freeze pipelines to this standard.
• It's not available on all platforms.
• It's really fast!

Based on this, I think it's something to discuss because it's going to have a big impact on the industry.

[colindaven]

You forgot the main arguments against DRAGEN

-licenses are limited by throughput
-licenses are REALLY expensive
-licenses are limited by application (buy DNA-seq, can't do RNA-seq).