Researchers Explore Creation of CyVerse Australia
Data scientists recently visited CyVerse headquarters to discuss federating the CyVerse infrastructure framework to support the Australian research community.
From left: Glenn Moloney (ARDC), Edwin Skidmore (CyVerse), Nirav Merchant (CyVerse), Rhys Francis (Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council), Andrew Lonie (EMBL-ABR), and Frankie Stevens (AARNet) gathered at the University of Arizona to discuss the process of federating CyVerse infrastructure. (Photo by Tina Lee/CyVerse).
Data scientists from Bioplatforms Australia, the Australian Data Research Commons, and the Australia's Academic and Research Network recently visited CyVerse headquarters at the University of Arizona’s BIO5 Institute to explore creating a version of CyVerse for the Australian life sciences community and federating with the U.S. The visit formed part of an Australian evaluation of global best practice digital technologies for supporting life sciences research.
The researchers met with CyVerse co-principal investigator Nirav Merchant and CyVerse director of infrastructure Edwin Skidmore over the course of one and a half days to detail the steps and necessary resources involved in replicating CyVerse’s infrastructure, which provides secure and easy-to-use tools and storage for large-scale data science endeavors.
Since the CyVerse cyberinfrastructure is open source, the project’s cloud and platform functionality can be fully implemented anywhere with the local high-performance computing capability to host the services.
Scientific research today is international, collaborative, and transdisciplinary, and practitioners need to efficiently store, access, and share datasets, analysis tools, workflows, and outputs. CyVerse provides researchers with a computational workbench on which they can accomplish all these tasks in one place. Federation with CyVerse enables the platform’s data management framework and analysis capabilities on top of the host’s local compute and data resources.
CyVerse has been federated once before in 2016 with the creation and launch of CyVerse UK, a CyVerse node hosted at the Earlham Institute in Norwich, UK. CyVerse UK provides independent versions of the CyVerse Data Store – a secure, integrated framework for small and large-scale data storage needs – a computational node, and API access.
“Since its inception in 2008, CyVerse has greatly expanded the services we are able to provide to our community of over 65,000 researchers in the life sciences and other domains,” said Merchant, who also directs the UA’s Data7 Data Science Institute. “We are excited by the possibility of sharing our roadmap with the Australian research infrastructure community so that researchers there will be able to make use of the technologies at the forefront of data science.”