The Genome Research Informatics & Data Science (GRIDS) Platform team is composed of 15 staff including senior research scientists, postdoctoral fellows and bioinformatics specialists. The focus of the GRIDS platform is to provide computing capabilities and support for GIS research groups and programmes they are engaged in. This is accomplished by a multipronged approach by:
- marshalling the wide array of computing infrastructures available to GIS research groups including on-premise, NSCC and ACRC high-performance (HPC) and niche (GPU, FPGA) computing resources, as well as cloud-based solutions
- developing, deploying and maintaining computational infrastructure agnostic (on-premise HPC, NSCC and ACRC HPC & cloud) data analysis pipelines and ecosystems
- providing analysis-workflow-integrated data management and governance solutions and ecosystems allowing research groups to focus on value-added contributions
- the advent of cloud-computing based solutions to effectively and economically process and store ever larger amounts of data presents new challenges. The shift from on-premise to on-cloud resources necessitates the adoption of novel and often more complex analytics and storage strategies. To facilitate this transition, the GRIDS platform has been deploying various cloud-enabler ecosystems (RONIN), as well as promote the use of infrastructure agnostic data analysis workflows (nf-core). The platform is also actively engaged with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to foster the development of an innovative integrated asset provisioning and governance ecosystem (RAPTOR) to further facilitate effective highly-scalable cloud-based scientific computing and data sharing.
Beyond its core mission to support GIS research groups and programmes, the GRIDS platform team is also particularly involved in:
- The Integrated Genomics Analysis Platform (iGAP)
This close collaboration with the Integrated Genomics Platform in GIS provides comprehensive NGS data processing, management and governance solutions and ecosystems. Since 2017, iGAP’s capabilities have been leveraged to also offer common bioinformatics support to the wider community on a cost-recovery fee-for-service model.
- The National Precision Medicine Programme (NPMP)
GRIDS contributions to NPMP includes developing sample and data tracking applications, automated data processing pipelines and data sharing, governance, exploration and analysis capabilities via both commercial-cloud and NSCC infrastructures.