UK Biobank has today launched a new programme to make Amazon Web Services (AWS) Credits available through the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform (RAP).
Courtesy of AWS, UK Biobank is able to provide up to $500,000 of credits per year ($1.5 million in aggregate) to early career researchers and researchers from lower income countries on approved projects. Credits can be used exclusively within UK Biobank’s Research Analysis Platform to offset the cost of compute analysis and data storage. UK Biobank is committed to democratising access to its research platform and this credits programme will support a greater number of researchers to access and analyse available datasets to enable discoveries that improve human health.
Related links
- Research Analysis Platform
- UK Biobank Credits Programme
The UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform has been built in partnership with DNAnexus and exponentially increases the scale and accessibility of the world’s largest and most comprehensive biomedical database for researchers around the world to advance understanding of human disease. Enabled by DNAnexus technology and powered by AWS, the platform provides approved researchers with the ability to access and analyse over 10 petabytes of data in the UK Biobank resource from anywhere in the world. Use of the RAP is rapidly growing with more than 1,200 researchers accessing the cloud platform worldwide. An online community has been established for researchers to ask questions and share best practice.
Further enhancements continue to be made to the UK Biobank RAP, including today’s significant release of new genetic data analysis tools. In collaboration with DNAnexus, the Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC) and NVIDIA, researchers will be able to access the entirety of the bioinformatics workflow used by RGC as part of the UK Biobank Whole Exome Sequencing project.
RGC sequenced and analysed 450,000 exomes in the UK Biobank database using a bioinformatics protocol comprising entirely of open-source tools, including BWA-MEM, GLnexus and Google’s DeepVariant. The scale and speed of this analysis (20,000 samples/week) was enabled by NVIDIA Clara Parabricks (GPU-accelerated software) running on the DNAnexus platform. These tools are now being provided to researchers through the UK Biobank RAP with a free 6 month trial licence to NVIDIA Clara Parabricks. It will enable all UK Biobank researchers the opportunity to fully harmonise their own data, at any scale, with the UK Biobank exome data.
