The Freibuger cloud solution for the German Center of Bioinformatics Infrastructure is provided through the university compute center in Freiburg. This includes computing infrastructure, a local mirror of reference genomes and indices, software stacks for all bioinformatic research areas offered as Conda packages or Containers and a Galaxy server for accessible and reproducible research combining all this in a user-friendly way. The provided cloud environment involves the following services:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The cloud infrastructure can be accessed via various virtualization technologies such as pre-build or personalised virtual machines, Docker- or Singularity containers. The user will be able to use computing resources via the HT-Condor, Moab or the Galaxy API to run resource consuming data analysis or simulations. Furthermore, users can set up web services in their virtualization environment and use the available resources for their applications.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): The Galaxy workflow systems will be the central Gateway to complex frameworks and analysis pipelines. Ranging from Cheminformatics, Metabolomics and Genomics to Imaging. The user will be able to use existing and community curated workflows and further customize it on its own.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): The Freiburg node is heavily involved in the BioConda and BioContainers initiative and therefore offers software suites out of the box for our users. The cloud site of Freiburg is focused, among other things, on the reproducibility of research data and their virtual research environments as Freiburg is a project partner of the CiTAR and ViCe project.
One major aim of the de.NBI cloud site in Freiburg is to provide software, reference data, training material and computational resources to bridge the gaps between different scientific fields. Our aim is to empower the masses to participate on their own research.
The de.NBI cloud infrastructure in Freiburg comprises more than 1800 compute cores, 10 TByte RAM and 300 TByte storage capacity.