Cloud Computing

The analysis of data sets obtained using omics methods requires ever greater computing and storage resources, which are not available to researchers locally. Cloud computing opens new possibilities for faster and more efficient processing of these data sets.

Challenges posed by high-throughput sequencing

In the recent past, enormous progress has been made in the development of high-throughput sequencing technologies. This has had a major impact not only on biological and medical research. This has resulted in exponentially increasing amounts of sequence data, which, in combination with the growing complexity of experiments, poses major challenges for bioinformatics.

New bioinformatics approaches for growing data volumes

The aim is to develop new bioinformatics approaches that enable the processing and interpretation of ever-increasing amounts of data. At IBG-5, research work in the field of metagenomics by the Computational Metagenomics research group meets the developments of the Bielefeld Bioinformatics Server Group, which deals with the provision of analysis pipelines in public and private cloud computing environments.

Networking and global use of resources

In the bioinformatics research community, the positive effects of networking and using globally distributed resources were recognized and implemented early on. Relevant tools and databases were made available online and thus accessible to the community's research groups.

Bielefeld Bioinformatics Server (BiBiServ)

The Bielefeld Bioinformatics Server (BiBiServ) was founded in 1996 with the aim of being able to offer the bioinformatics tools developed at the university on a long-term basis. To this end, a framework was developed that enables developers to make their tools and services available with minimal effort and to keep the necessary web server infrastructures up to date. In the last 10 years alone, more than 1.5 million orders from users in more than 90 countries have been processed via BiBiServ.

Cloud computing framework for bioinformatics tools

A cloud computing framework developed in our research group makes it possible to operate practically all BiBiServ tools in private and public cloud environments, such as AWS, Google Cloud or OpenStack. The BiBiGrid framework configures the available cloud computing resources into an HPC cluster and enables easy access to storage solutions in the cloud, which are becoming increasingly important for the huge amounts of data generated by research projects.

Research work in the field of tension between cloud computing and bioinformatics

Current developments and the associated need for immense computing and storage resources for analyzing huge data sets distributed across multiple locations must be met by efficient and powerful analysis tools and infrastructures. Dynamically scalable, "virtualized" resources and centralized data sets play an important role here. The research work carried out by our department is caught-up in this exciting interface.