- Cloud Computing, IoT Driving Healthcare Digital Transformations
Researchers have used more than 83 million hours of computational resources to access and analyze 115 petabytes of high-value biomedical data in the cloud–the equivalent of 2.3 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text.
One of the world’s largest, publicly available genome sequence repositories, the National Library of Medicine’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA), leveraged the STRIDES initiative to migrate more than 43 petabytes of sequencing data to the cloud.
This move is set to improve data access for millions of researchers. Through the cloud, researchers can now search the entire catalog of genomic data and use computational tools for analysis.
“The cloud can help democratize access to high-value research data and the most advanced analytical technologies for all researchers,” Andrea T. Norris, director of NIH’s Center for Information Technology and NIH chief information officer, said in a public statement.
“Expanding our network of providers and access to the most advanced computational infrastructure, tools, and services provides the agility and flexibility that researchers need to accelerate research discoveries,” she continued. “Partnering with Microsoft Azure as a cloud service provider furthers our goals to enhance discovery and improve efficiency in biomedical research.”
The STRIDES initiative ensures that all data made available through these partnerships follows NIH’s Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles.
“NIH has an ambitious vision of a modernized, FAIR biomedical data landscape,” said Susan K. Gregurick, PhD, associate director for data science and director of the Office of Data Science Strategy at NIH. “By partnering with Microsoft Azure, which has over three decades of experience in the cloud space, we can strengthen NIH’s data ecosystem and accelerate data-driven research and discovery.”
Microsoft Azure joins two other major cloud vendors, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, in support of the STRIDES initiative.
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