ELIXIR Cloud & AAI

Welcome to the GitHub presence of the ELIXIR Cloud and Authentication & Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) project.

Who we are

• We are a Driver Project of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), an international organization developing policies and technical standards to enable the responsible sharing of sensitive data across international boundaries. As such, the majority of our work is directly related to either the implementation or the further development/framing of these policies and standards, in particular those handled by the following GA4GH Work Streams:

  • Cloud
  • Data Security
  • Data Use and Researcher Identity

• We are also a subgroup of ELIXIR, a multinational Europe-based initative that unites life science laboratories and organizations to establish a common infrastructure that supports and integrates scalable, sustainable bioinformatics and data analysis services for member states and beyond. Within the ELIXIR network, we are responsible for leveraging a common cloud computing infrastructure in line with international community standards. ELIXIR is a strategic partner of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health.

Our mission

ELIXIR Cloud & AAI develops services towards establishing a federated cloud computing network that enables the analysis of population-scale genomic and phenotypic data across participating, international nodes.

Our solutions

This section is still in an early stage - check back soon!

Note: Implementations & services shown here are just for reference and include both currently unavailable (and possibly unplanned) implementations, as well as ones developed by independent organizations. We are not endorsing nor are being endorsed by any external organization.

• CWLab (working title; slides): a web portal operationalizing the GA4GH Cloud Work Stream for the end user, currently supporting workflows written in the Common Workflow Language (CWL), but with various other workflow languages on the roadmap
• cwl-WES (slides): a GA4GH Workflow Execution Service implementation for interpreting and decomposing CWL workflows into individual tasks which are then forwarded to a GA4GH Task Execution Service-compatible service for execution
• TESK: a GA4GH Task Execution Service implentation for Kubernetes
• TEStribute (slides): task distribution logic for extended GA4GH Task Execution Service instances

Our audience

Our solutions will have benefits for multiple stakeholders in the handling and analysis of personalized health and other big data. Key benefits for each target audience are listed below.

Click on the chat button at the top of the page to get in touch with us and discuss how you can be among the first to make use of our products!

Note that the listed points reflect our vision for the years 2025 and beyond. Moreover, for several of them we will require help by other GA4GH work streams and the corresponding implementers. See the section on FAIRness for more info on that. Also have a look at GA4GH's strategic roadmap.

Data analysts, experimentalists & healthcare practicioners

• Analyze your data in the cloud - no need to install anything or buy and maintain expensive IT infrastructure!
• Bring your own data or analyze available data sets - safely and securely!
• Select from a wide range of available workflows - or just use your own! Or perhaps you don't deal with workflows but are looking for a solution to run individual compute jobs on cloud infrastructure? Sure, that's possible, too!
• Reproduce your analysis with just a few button clicks to increase your confidence - or why not reproduce other people's analysis to build on top of it?
• Tired of collecting metadata about your data and analyses? Our products help in digitizing and, to some extent, automating a lot of this work!

Workflow engine developers

• You would like to write a new workflow engine but are scared of having to implement compute backends for a wide array of diverse IT infrastructure solutions? Or you already wrote one but have a hard time to maintain your compute backends and keep up with the technologies? Our tools allow you to focus on writing the code that interpretes your workflows, generates your DAGs and schedules execution - by (almost) any backend! Talk to us about implementing a TES client for your product.
• You would like to increase your user base and make it easy for people to run workflows in your language? Talk to us about implementing a WES shim around your new or existing engine.

IT infrastructure specialists & system administrators

• You are developing IT compute infrastructure solutions and you would like to increase their adoption? Talk to us about implementing a TES shim around your prodcuts and allow them to be hooked up to the federated compute networks that we help to build - and which we project will handle a lot of the big data analysis in the personalized medicine sector and beyond!
• You are managing a compute cluster or data center at a university, hospital, research center or in a company? Talk to us about implementing or deploying a TES or DRS instance to add your nodes or data to the network. Consumers of our services will be able to access them without hassle!

FAIR infrastructure

Section coming soon!

Supported projects

We provide services and technical support for the following projects and initiatives, which in turn test our products and drive future development. Check out the links for more details:

• 1+ Million Genomes initative
• ELIXIR Human Data community
• ELIXIR Marine Metagenomics community
• ELIXIR Rare Diseases community

Collaborators

Apart from the GA4GH Cloud community as a whole, we are working together closely with the following projects that develop similar services:

• WES2Galaxy: thin GA4GH Workflow Execution Service layer for the Galaxy Project
• SAPPORO: web portal for GA4GH Workflow Execution Service-based execution of workflows for the analysis of sensitive data hosted at the DNA Databank of Japan (DDBJ), Japan

Contact

Also see the list of individual members to see some actual people involved in this project, including contact information.