Overview
The Containers and Workflows Interest Group (CWIG) focuses on research in the biomedical community using the latest Container and Workflow Technologies on the cloud.
Scientific progress and the exponential growth of biomedical data put forth many challenges in high-throughput data storage, management, and analytics. Powerful computational infrastructure providing scalable, portable, high-quality analytical solutions and bioinformatics software, is the present need.
NCI has been leading technological advancements and has leveraged cloud technologies to provide and utilize high compute resources for analyzing petabyte-scale cancer data. The NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) is a cloud-based data science infrastructure that co-locates data with cloud-enabled analytics capabilities. NCI’s Cloud Resources, are components of CRDC, conceptualized in 2014. They provide an innovative, scalable, secure, and high compute one-stop model for computational analysis of data and allow users to share, integrate, analyze, and visualize cancer research data to drive scientific discovery. NCI Cloud Resources invest heavily in container technologies to provide validated ready-to-use bioinformatics workflows and pipelines to the research world.
Container technologies empower underlying IT infrastructures by enabling the portability of computing capabilities across various development and deployment environments. Containers are software units that contain all of the necessary elements to run an application or tool in any environment (cloud, data centers, HPC, or personal laptops), thereby virtualizing the operating system. The use of containers makes the workflows, applications, and tools streamlined, lightweight, secure, scalable, and portable.
NCI started this interest group and webinar series to bring together researchers across different institutes/organizations and foster collaborations. The webinar series discusses the latest advances in the field and promotes collaborative work utilizing these technologies to scale up and accelerate their research.
The Containers and Workflows Interest Group has ~120 subscribers to date and growing interest across NIH and collaborating extramural scientific community.
Who
Speakers from all over the globe with relevant scientific work and publications are invited to present at this series. The webinars are intended for researchers wanting to employ latest cloud technologies to further their biomedical research. This includes and is not limited to biologists, bioinformaticians, bio-statisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists and computer engineers. Though it is centered on cancer research, we do not limit our talks to just cancer.
When
The webinars series is open for all (national and international) audiences and takes place on the second Friday of every month from 3:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. ET.
You can access the information about future and past presentations under the Webinars tab.
To learn more about joining the group or presenting at the webinar series, please contact us at: NCICWIGUserMail@mail.nih.gov