Scaling bioinformatics and compute access for Australian molecular science research
Seqera has released a new case study featuring Australian BioCommons: Australian BioCommons Standardizes Bioinformatics and Scales Compute Access Nationwide with Seqera. It showcases how BioCommons enables the research community to analyse molecular and biological data at scale through the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service. By leveraging Nextflow and the Seqera Platform, and combining the right bioinformatics expertise and computational infrastructure, the service is driving real-world impact.
“We scaled national access to compute infrastructure. As a result, we now support more than 340 users from more than 40 different Australian organisations.”
— Ziad Al-Bkhetan, Product Manager, Bioinformatics Platforms, Australian BioCommons
The team at Australian BioCommons provides bioinformatics expertise, researcher support, and technical consultations to help researchers effectively utilise bioinformatics software and computational infrastructure for their work. This has standardised bioinformatics analysis nationwide, scaled compute access and capacity beyond institutional limits, and reduced costs by eliminating duplicated infrastructure and set up burdens for individual research groups.
“Seqera Platform has helped us a lot. We've been able to invite our researchers to jump in and see if the platform meets their needs. With the support of the BioCommons, we've had 15 researchers across 7 of our different research groups try it out. It's made launching pipelines easy for researchers who are not familiar with linux systems and command line.
— Julie Iskander, WEHI's Research Computing Platform Engineering team
The success of the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service has earned the team an invitation to present at the upcoming Nextflow Summit. They hope to share the journey of building this nationwide service, highlighting the collaborative effort required to coordinate multiple partners and the transformative impact delivered to researchers. The presentation, “Nextflow Across Australian BioCommons: From Community Training to National Research Infrastructure”, will cover how over the past few years BioCommons has taken a leading role in accelerating Nextflow adoption. Coordinated national activities have spanned live training, reusable training resources, community engagement, and establishing national-scale services for several general-purpose and specialised applications, such as molecular biology and biosecurity. Importantly, it will also describe how these complementary investments have supported the growth of a sustainable national Nextflow ecosystem and the importance of building community capability alongside production research infrastructure.
Explore the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service or read the full case study at Seqera.io.
Australian BioCommons operates the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service in collaboration with Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), and Seqera. The Service was established as an output of the Australian BioCommons Bring Your Own Data Expansion Project and is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). These efforts are enabled by NCRIS via funding from Bioplatforms Australia.
