The challenge for Calit2 and the CAMERA project is to consistently and continuously provide a cost-effective, high-performance environment where researchers from around the world have unlimited access to the existing genomics data for unfettered and unlimited access and analysis capabilities to aid in their meta genomics projects and also provide an open access repository for all researchers to deposit sequenced genomics data to share with the global research community.

Calit2 had been developing the CAMERA repository on a Sun cluster system with a PostgreSQL database. The load time for the initial batch of genomics data was 36 hours and query times were widely variable with the most complex queries being difficult to measure.

Calit2 and Kognitio staff members discussed the potential for operational issues in the CAMERA project as the community of researchers began to contribute larger and diverse sets of data to the repository and those same and a broader set of scientists began to rely on the database as a resource in their research.