Embedding the de.NBI Cloud in the National Research Data Infrastructure Activities

Abstract

In recent years, modern life sciences research underwent a rapid development driven mainly by the technical improvements in analytical areas leading to miniaturization, parallelization, and high throughput processing of biological samples. This has led to the generation of huge amounts of experimental data. To meet these rising demands, the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) was established in 2015 as a national bioinformatics consortium aiming to provide high quality bioinformatics services, comprehensive training, powerful computing capacities (de.NBI Cloud) as well as connections to the European Life Science Infrastructure ELIXIR, with the goal to assist researchers in exploring and exploiting data more effectively. Since its foundation, de.NBI Cloud has formed the scientific and collaborative backbone for new major German initiatives like NFDI or EOSC-Life in the European sector of computational biosciences. Above all, the cooperation with various NFDI consortia such as NFDI4Biodiversity, DataPLANT, GHGA, FAIRagro or NFDI4Microbiota showcases the power, range and flexibility of the de.NBI Cloud, especially for the national life science community. In conclusion, the de.NBI Cloud provides the ability to unlock the full potential of research data and enables easier collaboration across different ecosystems and research areas, which in turn enables scientists to innovate and scale-up their data-driven research, not only in the life and computational biosciences, but across the different science domains addressed by the NFDI.