Establishment of a ‘BioCloud’: cyberinfrastructure that is appropriate for data-driven biology research

Digital research in the life sciences is generally supported by group and/or institute-level digital infrastructure, with consequent inefficiencies and duplication of effort, plus uncertainties around interoperability and longevity.

A national approach will help harmonise resources and reduce duplication of infrastructure management in Australia, allowing domain efforts to be re-focused on methods development and dissemination.

Global cyber-infrastructure developments are increasingly focused on cloud infrastructure, as exemplified through the NIH Data Commons, the ELIXIR Compute and Data strategies, and the European Open Science Cloud. This program of work will focus on developing highly dependable, sustainable cloud infrastructure and expertise, developed and maintained in concert with international peer infrastructures.

Specific topics within this program of work include: 

• Developing a high-throughout cloud for bioinformatics

• Software and container orchestration

• Data movement

• Identity and access management

• User experience

• Exploring commercial cloud for research purposes.

Project partners and contributors