At my junior research group „Systems Medicine of the Liver“ at the Humboldt-University Berlin we are using the de.NBI cloud to conduct many aspects of large scale analysis of computational model of liver function. Thanks to the de.NBI cloud we are able to perform compute intensive tasks like parameter fitting, parameter scans and Monte-Carlo simulations.
Having easy access to compute infrastructure is especially important for small research groups with limited access to compute resources. Many of our scientific questions could not be tackled without the easy access to external compute resources. As part of moving work loads to the cloud we could containerize many of our use cases, thereby improving exchangability and reproducibility of our workflows and research.
A major advantage of the de.NBI cloud is that we save time managing hardware and servers and instead focus on the actual science. Compared to other cloud infrastructure the de.NBI cloud provides direct and uncomplicated contact with the support team and admins. Combined with the provided education, workshops and tutorials by de.NBI scientist without any cloud background are able to get started with cloud computing.
The focus on scientific projects in the de.NBI cloud brings like-minded people together, to solve the overall goal on bringing bioinformatics and systems biology workloads to the cloud.
