Biomed is a large-scale international Virtual Organization (VO) supporting communities from the Life Sciences sector focusing on three main groups: medical image analysis, bioinformatics and drug discovery.
Health & Medicine
BIOMED
BioMed: High Throughput Compute platform for image analysis in life sciences
The challenge
One of the flagship science gateways of BioMed is the Virtual Imaging Platform (VIP). Through VIP, researchers can access multiple applications, as well as important amounts of storage and computing resources, without required technical skills beyond the use of a web browser. The model has proved to be successful: VIP currently counts more than 1300 registered users, accessing 20 applications.
The challenge for VIP is now about interoperability and reproducibility, in the larger scope of a FAIR approach to scientific data analysis.
In the next few years, we can imagine a platform of platforms exchanging apps and data effortlessly. Re-usability of applications across platforms can be achieved with containers, which allow users to build applications on their desktops and run hundreds or even thousands of instances on remote CPUs.
The solution
The distributed infrastructure supporting biomed, and therefore VIP, consists of resources from the National Grid Initiatives (NGIs), EGI, supercomputing platforms (DEISA), infrastructures potentially provided by ESFRIs, and other possible resources (e.g. commercial/private cloud resources).
From the EGI Infrastructure, more specifically, 14 HTC and cloud resource providers are supporting the biomed community allocating computing and storage resources to serve the European Life Sciences community.
Services provided by EGI
Impact
>1,340 users
registered to the VIP portal (40% from outside Europe)
>202,598 of (Cloud) CPU hours
consumed over the last 2 years (Dec. 2019 – May 2021)
12,121,811 of (HTC) CPU hours
consumed over the last 2 years (Dec. 2019 – May 2021)
94 VMs
instantiated in the EGI Federated Cloud infrastructure
