Alice Minotto, Earlham Institute

CyVerse UK aims to provide life science researchers all over the world HPC access, with a geographical advantage to users located in the UK or EU, while tackling many known issues in bioinformatics, as need for training, difficulties in reproducibility of analyses, problems with dependencies and installation processes.

The core CyVerse cloud consists of a HTCondor pool, which includes 12 worker nodes and 3 submit machines, entry points for different projects. The use of the existing integration between Condor and Docker provides increased flexibility, decoupling the application development from the underlying infrastructure. We also hope the use of Docker will encourage both software developers and final users to contribute actively to the growth of the project.

CyVerse UK was born as a branch of CyVerse, a now mature US project. This collaboration is reflected, on a side, in the efforts to federate the Data Storage of the two projects through iRODS, on the other side, in the work being done to allow flocking from the US to the UK condor pool, that will allow jobs to run in the most favourable location.The CyVerse Openstack cloud also hosts other projects, with the purpose of enabling interoperability and sharing of data.