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The iPlant UK project is funded by a BBSRC grant and is a collaboration between The Earlham Institute (EI) in Norwich, University of Warwick, University of Liverpool, and University of Nottingham. The goal is to establish an overseas node of the iPlant platform to facilitate a wide range of life science research. See <iplantuk.org> for news and updates; this wiki is meant as a technical reference for the project.
iPlant is an online life sciences platform established at the University of Arizona and funded by the NSF. Its goal is to develop and expand the cyberinfastructure needed for modern day computational life sciences research. As modern biology becomes a 'big data' science with the increase of high throughput analysis methods, researchers in all fields have to cope with enormous datasets that require a lot of computational resources. While some labs are investing to build their own cyberinfastructure to deal with this onslaught of data, most research groups do not posess the knowledge and resources to build and maintain computational hardware. The goal of the iPlant project is to allow these scientists to handle and examine their data through a publicly available platform, at no cost.
Currently the iPlant project offers a number of 'products':
- Atmosphere - An online cloud computing service where users can create maintain and use Virtual Machines from their web browser
- Discovery Environment - A browser-based interface through which researchers can use bioinformatic tools using an easy to use GUI
- DNA Subway - An educational tools for students to explore and learn about bioinformatics
- Bisque - A tool for image management and image metadata management
- Data Commons (coming soon) - A platform to organize, share and manage scientific data
In addition to the tools created by the iPlant collaboration, many external projects that build on the iPlant resources have been created such as CoGe, iMicrobe and the 1000 Plant Transcriptomes Project.
The goal of the iPlant UK project is to add a physical hardware node to the iPlant network based in Norwich and to integrate a number of existing tools and pipelines from the Universities of Liverpool, Warwick and Nottingham.
For an overview of the available hardware in the UK project, please consult the CyVerse UK Infrastructure page.
For an overview of the tools that are being integrated and their status consult the individual University project pages: