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What Do We Offer?

Jupyter on Cheaha

Can you easily share new research-in-development with your team? Can you integrate data from diverse sources into your analyses?

Consider doing your scripting in data science notebooks, an abstraction that may improve shareability and reproducibility of data analyses and research results.

Meet Jupyter on Cheaha >

Data Version Control (DVC)

Is the "files and folders" abstraction limiting your team?

We can help you and your team use Git version control technology in innovative ways to manage big data and make more specific guarantees on Data Provenance and Reproducible Research!

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Better Data Transfer

Bothered by poor data transfer performance and a lack of data management options?

Perhaps better abstractions will help.

Research Computing has been working hard to stand up a Science DMZ DTN here at UAB and provide a Globus endpoint.

Benefit from a standard menu of production-quality options for transferring data to/from UAB expeditiously, reliably, and securely.

Managed Servers

Web servers, database servers, and cloud computing.

Designed in conjunction with investigators like you.

Implemented and maintained by IT professionals with a balance of performance, security, and control to meet the R&D needs of our partners.

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Proposal Development

None of BioITX really matters unless it makes our partners more competitive for grant and other funding.

Meet Proposal Development >

Managed Storage

Dedicated storage, processes, and documentation.

We help our partners to understand the many, sometimes confusing, options for research data management and select the solution that best fits their requirements.

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Social Networking

Shared workspace where communications are secure, organized, and accessible.

Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in BioITX and informatics infrastructure development.

Connect with other investigators. Share ideas. Work together.

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Guided Access to HPC

Best practices, SOPs, and capacity planning to help our partners maximize their use of local high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.

Get your lab, department, or center started quickly on HPC at UAB.

Meet Guided Access to HPC >

Internal Planning

Oversight committee meets monthly. Kanban board. Roadmap.

Take a peek at how we keep ourselves organized and on track to meet our infrastructure development goals.

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What Is Our Approach?

We connect high-performance computing (HPC) at UAB together with public cloud computing, to offer thoughtfully-targeted and higher-level abstractions for conducting impactful translational research.

In particular, we are developing informatics infrastructure that is:

  1. Modular
    • With components defining clear interfaces or APIs that can be composed and re-composed flexibly to solve different problems.
  2. Community-driven
    • With requirements reflecting the diversity of research among partnering entities at UAB.
  3. Open
    • With tools and technologies encouraging and enabling extension and re-use.
  4. Standards-based
    • With ongoing efforts like Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and FAIR principles for research data management firmly in mind.

What is Our Vision?

These are just some of the exciting possibilities in BioITX infrastructure development at UAB as we leverage one of our biggest strengths -- the close proximity of informatics to clinical and translational research.

Indeed, at the same time we are becoming more sophisticated consumers of harmonized data, vetted software pipelines, and pay-for-compute on various public clouds, like AHA’s Precision Medicine Platform, NCI’s Genomic Data Commons, and NHLBI’s Analysis Commons, we can work together to invest in the people, processes, and infrastructure necessary to realize a UAB “Data & Analysis Commons” towards a shared vision of better analyzing and integrating our own data, while meaningfully engaging the “Data Biosphere” and other similar standard, interoperable ecosystems.