1. ELIXIR: Potential areas for collaboration with e-Infrastructures
Beurs van Berlage
Amsterdam
14-17th September, 2010
Andrew Lyall
@emblebi

2. ELIXIR in one slide
Three year €3Million ESFRI BMS PP Project Consortium of 32 European organisations co-ordinated by EMBL-EBI
An e-Infrastructure with a current user base within Europe of at least one million (unique IP addresses accessing EMBL-EBI)
Provides the infrastructure to enable the utilisation of the Human Genome and all the other molecules of life, related data and services
Used in basic life sciences, agricultural, environmental, pharmaceutical and many other areas of research
ELIXIR was created to deploy these data in order to help to address the European Grand Challenges
Emerging disruptive technologies mean that there will be at least a 1000-fold increase in data over the next decade
Most of the data are available without authentication – the main exception is data relating to individual patients & volunteers

3. ELIXIR Support of the European Grand Challenges
ELIXIR supports the European Grand Challenges by providing Infrastructure for the other ESFRI Biology Projects.

4. One Million unique users in 2009
Very large user community
One Million unique users in 2009

5. Growth of disk storage at EMBL-EBI
Six petabytes at end of 2009.

6. Data growth exceeds growth in IT capability
CPU Power doubles <> 24 months (Moores Law)
Disk capacity doubles <> 18 months
1000
800
600
400
No. of Racks
200
2009
2018
Network bandwidth doubles <> 20 months
Racks in EBI machine room double <> 12 months

7. Workshop: BMS RI meet the e-Infrastructures
Two day event in March 2010
Held in Cambridge and hosted by EMBL-EBI
All ESFRI BMS RI were represented
All e-Infrastructures were represented
Exchange of ideas
Seven proposals for working together
Which now follow...

8. Project 1: Replication of services
The amount of bio-molecular data will increase by at least one thousand-fold over the ESFRI period
It may become unfeasible to provide access from a single place
Identical copies “mirrors” will be needed to provide access
There may be other reasons for needing replication
Can take place at many levels: data, RDBMS, Service etc
Work with HPC centres to develop service provision based on replication

9. Project 2: Constrained virtual machines
Data derived from identifiable humans (patients and volunteers) needs very high levels of protection
Will also need to be made available to investigators
Will need to be combined and compared with very large public data sets where access is not controlled
Constrained virtual machines should be investigated as a means of achieving this

10. Project 3: Increased use of GÉANT
Increase in the size of biological datasets will have an impact on network bandwidth requirements and utilisation
Work with GÉANT to ensure that this is achieved optimally

11. Project 4: Image infrastructure
Every area of life sciences is implementing technologies that produce images.
These are at every scale from single molecules to whole organisms
This also includes videos which are extremely large
These data will, in due course, be the largest in all of biology
They will need to be linked to bio-molecular data in various ways
Develop a prototype to link phenotype-images of mouse-models of human disease to relevant bio-molecular datasets

12. Project 5: Deploy services from HPC Centre
Historically bio-molecular and related service provision has taken place from biology-specific service providers
In the future biology will need the scale provided by HPC Centres
CSC in Finland has track record of working with biologists
There is an ESFRI BMS cluster providing critical mass around the CSC
Deploy various cloud/grid based services from CSC

13. Project 6: Provide capacity planning information
New significant biology data generators and users are appearing all over Europe
The e-Infrastructure providers need to know about these
ESFRI BMS should develop and co-ordinate these to provide capacity planning information to the e-Infrastructure providers

14. Project 7: Feedback to e-Infrastructures
Traditionally the various e-Infrastructures have provided their services independently.
They are now working to harmonise their activities
They need feedback from users and potential users to assist with this.
ESFRI BMS should canvas and co-ordinate responses from their user base

15. Summary Europe is facing unprecedented (grand) challenges.
The solutions are (mainly) biological
There are emerging (disruptive) technologies that offer ways forward
These are very demanding of IT (e-Infrastructure)
Biology has not been here before
It will be necessary to move quickly to arrange the necessary funding streams
Action is needed at every level (scientific, technical, funding, political, ...).

16. Biology e-Infrastructure Requirements
e-Infrastructure available in Europe
Capability
e-Infrastructure required by biology
Now t