Accelerating genomic workflows using NVIDIA Parabricks.

Background: As genome sequencing becomes better integrated into scientific research, government policy, and personalized medicine, the primary challenge for researchers is shifting from generating raw data to analyzing these vast datasets. Although much work has been done to reduce compute times using various configurations of traditional CPU computing infrastructures, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) offer opportunities to accelerate genomic workflows by orders of magnitude. Here we benchmark one GPU-accelerated software suite called NVIDIA Parabricks on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and an NVIDIA DGX cluster.

From biomedical cloud platforms to microservices: next steps in FAIR data and analysis.

The biomedical research community is investing heavily in biomedical cloud platforms. Cloud computing holds great promise for addressing challenges with big data and ensuring reproducibility in biology. However, despite their advantages, cloud platforms in and of themselves do not automatically support FAIRness.

FAIRshake: Toolkit to Evaluate the FAIRness of Research Digital Resources.

As more digital resources are produced by the research community, it is becoming increasingly important to harmonize and organize them for synergistic utilization. The findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) guiding principles have prompted many stakeholders to consider strategies for tackling this challenge. The FAIRshake toolkit was developed to enable the establishment of community-driven FAIR metrics and rubrics paired with manual and automated FAIR assessments.

Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?

The thesis presented here is that biomedical research is based on the trusted exchange of services. That exchange would be conducted more efficiently if the trusted software platforms to exchange those services, if they exist, were more integrated. While simpler and narrower in scope than the services governing biomedical research, comparison to existing internet-based platforms, like Airbnb, can be informative.