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April 8, 2020

Earlham Institute Provides Computational Resources for UK Life Science Researchers Working from Home

April 8, 2020 — The Earlham Institute is offering cloud-based resources through CyVerse UK and Galaxy for UK-based life science researchers working from home that are requiring additional computing power.

As large numbers shift to working from home for the foreseeable weeks and months, many researchers will be taking this opportunity to run those bioinformatics analyses they hadn’t had time for amidst a busy wet lab schedule.

Thankfully, bioinformatics lends itself very well to working from home – as long as users have the computational power. This isn’t something every researcher has access to but, fortunately, help is at hand.

The Earlham Institute provides the National Capability in e-Infrastructure, hosting one of the largest data centers for life science research in Europe. This equips the institute with more than enough capacity to share some of its computational resources with the wider scientific community.

Through CyVerse UK, a cyberinfrastructure hosted at EI, researchers can access cloud resources such as virtual machines (VMs) with a number of different configurations tailored to their needs, ranging from a bare Ubuntu Linux machine to VMs pre-installed with Python, R, and other bioinformatics tools. The institute can also host websites, as well as web services that might need a computational infrastructure to run jobs. The team can help answer any questions users will have and recommend options, which include additional scratch storage space and longer-term object storage while you work on your project.

The CyVerse UK platform also hosts several bioinformatics data management and analysis tools and applications, including COPO to help users submit data to public repositories, and Grassroots Genomics to help users share wheat and other crop-related data.

Researchers can also request access to the Galaxy service, also hosted on CyVerse UK, providing easy web-based access to the most common bioinformatics tools for genomics, transcriptomics, phylogenetics and more.

For more information, please contact the team at CyVerse UK, check out the CyVerse UK website, and read more about Earlham Institute’s National Capability in e-Infrastructure on the EI website. EI hosts the ELIXIR-UK node, and those interested can find more information on ELIXIR-UK.

About Earlham Institute

The Earlham Institute (EI) is a world-leading research Institute focusing on the development of genomics and computational biology. EI is based within the Norwich Research Park and is one of eight institutes that receive strategic funding from Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) – £5.43m in 2017/18 – as well as support from other research funders. EI operates a National Capability to promote the application of genomics and bioinformatics to advance bioscience research and innovation. www.earlham.ac.uk @EarlhamInst.


Source: Earlham Institute 

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