de.NBI cloud compute and storage resources predominantly reserved to fight COVID-19

A. Sczyrba, P. Belmann, Bielefeld University
de.NBI cloud coordination

COVID-19 related research requires extensive involvement from areas such as epidemiology, bioinformatics, molecular modeling, etc. In this context, enormous computing capacities are necessary. The de.NBI Cloud supports these research activities with one of the most powerful academic clouds in Europe by providing compute and storage resources to combat the virus.

The de.NBI Cloud Federation provides computing resources for the life sciences. This includes more than 20,000 CPUs and 30 PB storage. We want to give researchers from Germany and across Europe the opportunity to improve our understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and to accelerate the development of treatments and vaccines to combat COVID-19.

Scientists involved in projects to curb the corona pandemic, prevent and treat COVID-19, or other corona virus related work will be given priority access to de.NBI cloud resources. de.NBI encourages scientists who need compute resources for their work to contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The de.NBI Cloud provides different types of projects, starting from pre-configured VMs (de.NBI Cloud SimpleVMs), where software packages for certain use cases are pre-installed and accessible through a remote desktop. Larger projects can utilize Openstack projects (Infrastructure as a Service) or Kubernetes or SLURM clusters (Platform as a Service). If you are unsure which project type would fit your needs, contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Project applications can be submitted via the de.NBI Cloud Portal (https://cloud.denbi.de/get-started/). Applications include a short description (less than one page) of the proposed project and a list of required resources. The research proposals will then be checked for compliance with the resources at the respective de.NBI Cloud sites. Access to resources will be provided ASAP. Teams who get access to de.NBI Cloud resources are expected to publish their results in the open scientific literature.

The following COVID-related projects are supported by the de.NBI Cloud:

  • ELIXIR’s services to support COVID-19 research
  • Magellan: COVID-19 Omics Explorer
  • MapMyCorona
  • German Human Genome Phenome Archive GHGA
  • COV2Imaging
  • Best practices for the analysis of SARS-CoV-2 data: Genomics and Cheminformatics
  • COVID19 Pangenome Visualization
  • Folding@home supporting COVID-19 research
  • The #WirVsVirus Hackathon