The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), an international standard-setting organization bringing together opinion leaders in academia and industry, has proposed a set of community standards for data storage, transfer and processing in the cloud. ELIXIR Cloud & AAI, a GA4GH Driver Project, is developing the ELIXIR::GA4GH Cloud (EGC), a federated cloud environment for large-scale data analysis in the life sciences. Interoperability across services and clouds is achieved through adopting GA4GH standards and authentication and authorization guidelines.
Due to their focus on interoperability, GA4GH standards and EGC services are perfectly suited for hybrid and multicloud solutions, as envisioned and implemented by de.NBI. Indeed, collaborations to that effect are ongoing with various de.NBI nodes and contributors, including at the Charité and the DKFZ, as well as the German Human Genome-Phenome Archive.
We have recently set up the Krini web portal as an entry point into the EGC, with individual services deployed at nodes in the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany and Greece. They can be used by our driver projects and other interested parties to run data analysis workflows of various types (currently CWL, Nextflow and Snakemake), some of them in a federated manner, i.e.. different tasks of a workflow are executed at different nodes.
The main goals of the hackathon project are to engage additional drivers/testers, systems/service administrators and service developers in the de.NBI community to work on use cases, further the adoption of standards, testing and expanding current EGC functionalities with respect to hybrid and multicloud use cases, repository management and documentation, and working on the new EGC landing page.
Skills we are looking for
We are looking for contributors with expertise in any of the following areas:
- Developers (Python, TypeScript/Javascript)
- DevOps (Kubernetes, HPC, commercial clouds, GitHub Actions)
- UI/graphics designer
- Bionformaticians (for testing)
If you feel that you don’t fall into any of those categories but you are interested in contributing anyway, please reach out and we will work something out.
For further information for possible contributors, please check out this document (work in progress; will be finalized closer to the date of the hackathon).
Project lead: Alexander Kanitz <