IFB academic Cloud

The IFB cloud must not only provide hardware resources but must also facilitate the access to the hundreds of databases used in biology and the use of the great many software tools available to analyze experimental data produced by the life sciences community.

The IFB cloud is designed to take into account the specificities of the life science domain including the use of a large number of data collections (more than a thousand exist) with their format heterogeneity and broad geographic range. In addition, the analysis of biological data requires the use of several hundred bioinformatics tools with different types of interfaces (graphic user interfaces, web portals, web services, and command line interfaces). IFB’s objective is to provide scientists and engineers as well as users and developers with the required computing and storage capacity while providing a flexible, user-friendly, easily adjustable solution.

Currently, the IFB cloud comprises more than 6,000 computing cores and 28 terabytes (TB) of RAM. These resources are distributed among 7 sites: GenOuest, PRABI-LBBE, BiRD, BIstrO, Bilille,
CBP-PSMN and the national node IFB-core. The IFB-core’s IT infrastructure is hosted at CNRS IN2P3 datacenter, one of the 4 major French academic computing centers. This ensures the stability of the infrastructure by providing a reliable power supply, cooling system and large network bandwidth commonly found in such environments.

The IFB federation of clouds, IFB-Biosphère, relies on the interconnected IT infrastructures of the participant IFB platforms, providing personalized services to analyze life science data.The targeted organization model will create a balance between data movement, which may be very costly in some cases and even impossible with confidential data, and the automatic deployment of appliances on local clouds, the closest possible to data repositories but requiring a local cloud-compatible infrastructure.