Galaxy, TACC and SDSC NIH Award to Develop Cloud Workspace Implementation Center

The Galaxy teams at Penn State and Johns Hopkins Universities received an award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) to develop the CFDE Cloud Workspace Implementation Center (CWIC). The project was awarded for five years under NIH Award #OT2OD037936.

We will collaborate with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) to build a comprehensive cloud workspace to support the NIH research community. By building on the Galaxy platform, the CloudBank project, and the powerful computing and data storage of TACC, the CFDE Cloud Workspace will offer researchers an intuitive starting point to manage and integrate datasets; draw from a large, established catalog of bioinformatics tools; build, share, and search for workflows that align with their datasets; and support collaboration with trusted colleagues.

This CFDE Cloud Workspace will have many advantages:

• The open source, widely adopted Galaxy platform interface and capabilities are already familiar to most life sciences research communities.
• The platform can leverage all major cloud providers and academic compute resources, giving unparalleled cost control and flexibility over time.
• Community adoption and contribution to Galaxy tools and workflows mean the analytical capability will be expansive on day one with proven extensibility as new tools arise.
• The open source nature of the platform and compatibility across cloud resources ensures sustainability beyond the duration of the project.
• The platform will provide long-term infrastructure stability and empower research innovation.
• The initial tier is at no cost to the researcher.

For more information, see the press release at TACC and the NIH CFDE Funded Research page.