We propose the further consolidation of theBioHackCloud (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