NCI 2018 - NCI Cloud Resources

Technological advancements have given us the ability to sequence genomes in great depths, and, consequently, generated an exponential growth in data. National Cancer Institute Cloud Resources (NCICR)​ , formerly the NCI Cancer Genomics Cloud Pilots, were developed with a goal of enhancing the utility of cancer genomic data and facilitating analysis by co-locating cloud computing and petabyte-scale data. Based on commercial cloud architectures, the Cloud Resources offer the flexibility for users to utilize tools in the form of Docker containers, and tools can be joined to form complex workflows described by Common Workflow Language (CWL) or Workflow Description Language (WDL). The utility and application of the Cloud Resources has been expanded from cancer genomics to include microbe analysis, proteomics, imaging and other “omics” in the future. The cloud environment has proven to be a cost-effective, reproducible, reusable, interoperable, and user-friendly alternative to high-performance computing, with minimal overhead and setup requirements. These production-ready and highly scalable platforms represent a necessary step in a publicly available toolset meant to support open and Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) scientific research.
Through this demonstration workshop, participants will have the opportunity to
learn about the basic features of the NCICR
create interoperable, containerized tools, and
run genomic analysis on the three cloud-based platforms.