Synopsis
Welcome to the home of ELIXIR Cloud & AAI. We are developing FAIR infrastructure solutions for the analysis of large scale data in the life sciences and beyond.
Who we are
ELIXIR Cloud & AAI is a Driver Project of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), led by the ELIXIR Compute Platform. As such we are committed to help develop, promote and adopt GA4GH standards and policies, and, vice versa, represent ELIXIR interests and use cases within the GA4GH.
But what are these organizations?
ELIXIR
“ELIXIR is an intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe. These resources include databases, software tools, training materials, cloud storage and supercomputers.
The goal of ELIXIR is to coordinate these resources so that they form a single infrastructure. This infrastructure makes it easier for scientists to find and share data, exchange expertise, and agree on best practices. Ultimately, it will help them gain new insights into how living organisms work. […]
ELIXIR includes 22 members and one Observer, bringing together over 220 research organisations. It was founded in December 2013 […].”
What are ELIXIR Platforms?
“ELIXIR Platforms bring together experts from Nodes to develop ELIXIR’s technical vision and coordinate activities in defined technical areas. There are five Platforms: Data, Tools, Interoperability, Compute and Training.”
What is the role of the ELIXIR Compute Platform?
“The ELIXIR Compute Platform was established in 2015 to build and integrate cloud, compute, storage and access services for the life-science research community.
Today, thousands of science laboratories across the world generate massive amounts of data that they make available to collaborators directly or place in public archives for open access. In this situation, the traditional method of a researcher downloading and analysing data locally is no longer viable due to both the data size and scope of the analysis activities.
The data needs to be managed as a federation, where data providers work as a single infrastructure providing mechanisms where researchers can bring their analysis to where the data is located. The ELIXIR Compute Platform infrastructure will allow life scientists to easily access, share and analyse data from different sources across Europe.
The objective is to combine all components of the ELIXIR Compute services into a seamless workflow. A researcher may use the ELIXIR Authorisation and Authentication services to securely create a scientific software analysis environment, and use the environment to access large biological data resources stored in a cloud.”
The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health
“The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is an international, nonprofit alliance formed in 2013 to accelerate the potential of research and medicine to advance human health. Bringing together 600+ leading organizations working in healthcare, research, patient advocacy, life science, and information technology, the GA4GH community is working together to create frameworks and standards to enable the responsible, voluntary, and secure sharing of genomic and health-related data.”
More succinctly, the GA4GH mission reads as follows (highlight added):
”The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health aims to accelerate progress in genomic research and human health by cultivating a common framework of standards and harmonized approaches for effective and responsible genomic and health-related data sharing.”
What are GA4GH Work Streams?
“GA4GH Work Streams develop standards, tools, and frameworks that are designed to overcome technical and regulatory hurdles to international genomic data-sharing.”
There are currently eight Work Streams from two categories, Foundational and Technical Work Streams.
Foundational Work Streams:
- Data Security
- Regulatory & Ethics
Technical Work Streams:
- Clinical & Phenotypic Data Capture
- Cloud
- Data Use & Researcher Identities (DURI)
- Discovery
- Genomic Knowledge Standards
- Large Scale Genomics
And what about GA4GH Driver Projects?
“GA4GH Driver Projects are real-world genomic data initiatives that help guide our development efforts and pilot our tools. Stakeholders around the globe advocate, mandate, implement, and use our frameworks and standards in their local contexts.”
What we do
Now that you hopefully have a good idea of the context in which we are operating and the organizations involved, let’s explore what we do and how we work.
The mission of the ELIXIR Cloud & AAI is to:
Establish techincal cloud infrastructure environments that enable population-scale analysis of sensitive data across organizational and national boundaries
Note that we are not focusing our efforts on all aspects of cloud computing environments, but just the technical aspects of delivering federated compute and data storage/transfer solutions. Other projects (like, for example GAIA-X) focus more on providing services dealing with the regulatory and governance side of cloud computing.
Our solutions
To achieve our mission, we are providing two solutions, each targeting different audiences:
- Our ELIXIR Cloud Software Development Kit (SDK) provides individual building blocks for establishing on premise, hybrid and multicloud-enabled cloud computing environments. Following the microservice and micro frontend architecture, our building blocks are highly modular and could reasonably be considered FAIR infrastructure. The target audience for our ELIXIR Cloud SDK consists of systems administrators that would like to set up interoperable cloud solutions for their organizations and service developers who would like to make their services available to users of ELIXIR Cloud-based infrastructures.
- Based on the ELIXIR Cloud SDK building blocks, we provide the ELIXIR Cloud, a multicloud cloud computing infrastructure that allows life scientists (end users) within and beyond the ELIXIR network and beyond to run their large-scale data analysis workloads in a federated network of ELIXIR compute and storage nodes. The ELIXIR Cloud is accessible via a centralized modern and user-friendly web portal that ensures that compute jobs are distributed across the network according to the requirements imposed by the particular workload, such as data use limitations or time and cost constraints.
How we work