Bioinformatics resources on EGI Federated Cloud

Data can be “big” for three reasons – often referred to as the three V's; volume of data, velocity of processing the data, and variability of data sources. If any of these key features are present, then big-data tools are necessary, often combined with high network bandwidth and massive compute systems. As NGS technologies are revolutionizing life science research, established workflows in facilitating the first steps in data analysis are being increasingly employed. Cloud computing provides a robust and cost-efficient solution towards supporting the computational demands of such workflows. In particular, NGS data analysis tools are constantly becoming available as resources within EGI’s Federated Cloud. The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is the result of pioneering work that has, over the last decade, built a collaborative production infrastructure of uniform services through the federation of national resource providers that supports multi-disciplinary science across Europe and around the world. EGI currently supports an extensive list of services available for life sciences and has been working together with the community to implement further support. The EGI Federated Cloud (FedCloud), the latest infrastructure and technological offering of EGI, is a prime example of a flexible environment to support both discipline and use case through Big Data services. Finally, in addition to providing access to advanced tools and applications, e-infrastructures like EGI, provide the opportunity to create training tools for life science researchers and to create synergies between life sciences and ICT researchers, which is fundamental in moving research forward.