EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) reveals Google Cloud as their new strategic cloud partner
The world’s most comprehensive set of freely available and up-to-date molecular data resources has combined with one the world’s leading cloud providers, as the EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) announces it has chosen Google Cloud as a strategic cloud partner.
The five-year partnership between the EMBL-EBI and Google Cloud is expected to accelerate the pace of service delivery to the life science institute’s global user community, which includes research labs, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and more.
The EMBL-EBI are renowned for hosting a range of open data resources for the life sciences community, spanning genomics, proteins, chemical data, and more. Openly available for anyone to use, the data resources are similar to a digital public library.
Refining infrastructure to accelerate scientific discovery
Using Google Cloud’s cloud infrastructure and services, the EMBL-EBI will accelerate the processing of data from the community, providing more value for researchers and stakeholders and delivering new insights.
Strategic aims from the partnership between Google Cloud and EMBL-EBI include:
- Be an exemplar to the global community by improving access to biomedical research
- Speed up the pace of scientific discovery and distribute these insights globally
- Provide a flexible platform to develop new cloud tools and technologies, supporting EMBL-EBI’s multicloud and hybrid-cloud strategy
- Accelerate cloud adoption within the life sciences community through training, building and deploying cloud native apps.
Open access to data still paramount
Fears over any access issues from the global research community have been allayed, with use of cloud infrastructure supporting EMBL-EBI’s existing goals and findings still openly available from the institute’s data resources and tools.
The data hosted by EMBL-EBI will continue to be stored in the institute’s data centres and will remain accessible via existing methods indefinitely. Any copies of selected data may be stored and processed in Google Cloud, in compliance with EMBL’s internal data classification and data protection policies.
All data stored on Google Cloud by EMBL-EBI remains under EMBL-EBI control and delivery, fully leveraging Google Cloud’s advanced data protection capabilities.
Steven Newhouse, Head of Technical Services, EMBL-EBI commented: “Google has an incredible network of life science expertise as well as infrastructure services that provide a tremendous opportunity to work together to help speed up scientific discovery. We’re excited about the possibilities that Google Cloud’s secure, flexible, and connected infrastructure can provide to EMBL-EBI to enable our services to be accessed globally.”
Mark Palmer, Head of Public Sector, EMEA, Google Cloud, said: “As we continue our work with customers in the research space, the impact of cloud computing becomes increasingly clear. As part of this new partnership, we have the opportunity to accelerate research by providing EMBL-EBI with high performance computing solutions that will provide researchers with the tools and compute to drive more effective and efficient research.“
Google continues shift from genomics to life sciences
The Cloud Life Sciences network continues to grow, with the community able to include the likes of SevenBridges, BC Platforms, Sentieon, BlueBlee, quantiphi and epam in their partner ecosystem. Formerly known as Google Genomics, the Cloud Life Sciences service enables the community to process biomedical data at scale; in a cost effective manner. While the client is busy processing, analysing and annotating data to reproduce results, Google Cloud allows this data to scale using containerised workflows.
By ALEXTUCK | Technology Magazine
