Keynotes: Tuesday keynote: Big data analysis in European clouds: The challenges for life science

Abstract

The life sciences community, is one of many science domains, that is having to deal with the challenges of big data analysis. Unlike many other research areas, life sciences data can contain significant personal information (e.g. medical records) and the consequences of any data analysis can have profound health implications for the individual (e.g. a cancer diagnosis). It is therefore not surprising that such data is highly regulated and is frequently kept within the organization it is collected in (i.e. a hospital) and external network access highly controlled. Any platform for analyzing life science data has to therefore reflect the complexity of the underlying data. ELIXIR, is a European wide research infrastructure for the life sciences, that is building a compute platform to support such data analysis activities. Building upon the work that has taken place previously in e-Infrastructure/cyber-infrastructure communities, the compute platform has been working to establish a federated cloud infrastructure to support both flagship science use cases and research activities coming from the ‘long-tail’. The presentation will review some of the early results of the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE project and how this work is being aligned with both institutional activities at the European Bioinformatics Institute, and more broadly the agenda of the European Cloud Initiative, in order to support the research challenges coming from leading European life science researchers.