We propose the further consolidation of the BioHackCloud (BHC) - a cloud-based infrastructure for the federated analysis of biological/biomedical data based on Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) standards and other relevant open community standards. The ELIXIR Cloud infrastructure serves as the initial BHC, with mid- to long-term plans of integrating with other cloud infrastructures like Sapporo, Galaxy/Pulsar, Microsoft Azure.
The BHC will be offered to interested BioHackathon participants, with BHC project participants providing training and support for the realization of individual use cases (e.g., construction of API calls, making workflows cloud-ready). Feasibility will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but where use cases cannot be realized with the current infrastructure, their support will be considered for the BHC roadmap or, where possible, will be implemented on site.
Next to supporting other BioHackathon projects and integrating with other cloud infrastructures, another main goal for the BHC project is the implementation of additional features. In this hackathon, a focus will be placed on enhancing data privacy and security features of the BHC by providing Confidential Computing support as developed byGENXT. However, integration with other community standards (e.g., RO-Crate and implementations (e.g., WorkflowHub, BioContainers is also possible, depending on participants’ interests.
Alexander Kanitz, Pavel Nikonorov
The project will feature 3 main topics (more details will follow):
- Work around the GA4GH-SDK and confidential computing (led by Pavel Nikonorov)
- Work around the WfExS workflow execution service (led by Paula Iborra)
- Work around JupyterHub (led by Viktória Spišaková)
Moreover, there will be a half-day workshop:
- ELIXIR On Cloud onboarding for compute and data centers (led by @Alex Kanitz)
Once the leads provide more detailed descriptions on each of the topics, we will create a poll on our Slack channel where participants can select their favorite topics. Note that this is just to give leads an idea of how many issues to prepare - it is not binding.
We will have a centralized project board that will feature detailed, byte-sized issues for the various topics, including labels for orientation ("good first issue"). The project board is currently still empty but will be filled up successively until the start of the event (a dedicated repo for creating meta issues or issues for existing code projects not hosted under the ELIXIR Cloud & AAI organization has been created here).
If you are interested in joining the project, please join the dedicated Slack channel! Say hi, be a fly on the wall or suggest additional topics, workshops, issues, connections/integrations with other BioHackathon projects etc. Everyone is welcome :)