Bioinformatics Frontiers: Building towards cloud-native applications & beyond

Bioinformaticians are only starting to adapt to the emerging landscape of serverless applications aiming to cater to fluctuating computational demand across research centres and industry. We are entering a new era of integrated data analysis as data now comes in all shapes and formats, and bioinformaticians need new ways of managing and working with disconnected data to deliver actionable insights.

This is the reason why we chose the summer edition of this year’s London Bioinformatics Frontiers Conference to focus on confronting these rising challenges and, more importantly, look beyond them to understand how bioinformaticians are finding ways to deal with and solve these pressing issues.

Nextflow has emerged as the main state-of-the-art programming framework used to solve challenges related to parallelising analyses and making them portable across different systems, be it on HPC or on the cloud. Containers are used to make analyses reproducible by bundling code dependencies. To tackle the problems of scalability regarding big biomedical and omics data analyses, the cloud has also evolved to enable even more people and applications to achieve limitless scale on-demand at a much faster pace. To date, over 3,200 bioinformatics applications have been developed, with over 35% of them having been developed for genomics analysis, 25% for transcriptomics and 25% for proteomics. This poses a huge challenge for bioinformaticians to go about managing these growing number of applications and standardise their analyses, while at the same time ensuring they are using the latest innovations. This is why Lifebit developed CloudOS, as it is the only platform technology, to date, offering a solution to this problem. It is used to orchestrate and manage “in one place” not only the user’s tools, but also run analysis in a standardised manner over the user’s own cloud/HPC, bringing the computation to the data, rather than the other way around.

The ultimate goal of this conference is to bring together the best speakers in the industry, who will navigate and expose the challenges that can be tackled by using these and other similar technologies. By focusing on the application of these technologies to real-world large-scale bioinformatics and data analysis challenges, rather than covering the basics of the technologies, we believe that the conference attendees will leave informed and empowered to tackle similar challenges in their own work. 

Therefore, along with The Francis Crick Institute, we are happy to welcome anyone interested in attending the London Bioinformatics Frontiers Conference: “Standardising & scaling your analysis using Nextflow, Containers & Cloud”, that will be held from June 17th to June 18th at The Francis Crick Institute in London.

Don’t forget to sign up @ bioinformatics-frontiers.com!

Looking forward to seeing you all in June!

Dr. Maria Chatzou | CEO @ Lifebit