NIH expands biomedical research in the cloud with Microsoft Azure
3 min readNews Release
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
Microsoft Azure has joined the Countrywide Institutes of Health’s Science and Technology Exploration Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative as the most recent cloud provider supplier to aid biomedical analysis. The addition of this most recent marketplace companion will further more the STRIDES Initiative’s intention to accelerate biomedical study in the cloud by minimizing financial and process boundaries as perfectly as delivering price tag-helpful entry to cloud platforms, instruction, cloud specialists, and ideal practices for optimizing analysis in the cloud.
In just a couple many years, the STRIDES Initiative has expanded entry to important infrastructure and slicing-edge cloud methods for NIH scientists, as effectively as NIH-funded researchers at additional than 2,500 educational institutions throughout the country. To day, NIH has helped far more than 425 study applications and initiatives leverage cloud means as a result of the STRIDES Initiative. Collectively, researchers have employed more than 83 million hours of computational sources to entry and review far more than 115 petabytes of high-benefit biomedical info in the cloud. This is equivalent to 2.3 million 4-drawer submitting cabinets comprehensive of text.
By leveraging the STRIDES Initiative, the Countrywide Library of Medicine’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) — one particular of the world’s premier, publicly readily available genome sequence repositories — migrated in excess of 43 petabytes of “next generation” sequencing data to the cloud, easing entry for tens of millions of researchers. Employing the cloud, scientists can now search the whole catalog of genomic knowledge and consider edge of the computational equipment for analysis.
“The cloud can assist democratize entry to superior-worth investigation knowledge and the most sophisticated analytical systems for all researchers. Expanding our network of vendors and accessibility to the most highly developed computational infrastructure, instruments, and expert services delivers the agility and adaptability that researchers need to speed up analysis discoveries,” reported Andrea T. Norris, Director of NIH’s Heart for Information Technological innovation and NIH Main Details Officer. “Partnering with Microsoft Azure as a cloud company provider furthers our aims to boost discovery and improve efficiency in biomedical investigate.”
“We normally threat losing the worth of biomedical info due to the fact of the sheer volumes becoming produced and digitized close to the earth. By leveraging cloud and synthetic intelligence capabilities, biomedical scientists are ready to quickly identify and extract crucial, lifesaving insights from this sea of data,” claimed Toni Townes-Whitley, President, U.S. Controlled Industries, Microsoft. “We are honored to collaborate with the NIH to help scientists remedy some of today’s major health-related troubles, in assist of a more healthy and extra sustainable international population.”
A central tenet of the STRIDES Initiative is that details manufactured accessible through these partnerships will integrate expectations endorsed by the biomedical research group to make details Findable, Obtainable, Interoperable, and Reusable (Good).
“NIH has an ambitious vision of a modernized, Reasonable biomedical information landscape,” said Susan K. Gregurick, Ph.D., Affiliate Director for Data Science and Director of the Business office of Knowledge Science Tactic at NIH. “By partnering with Microsoft Azure, which has around 3 decades of expertise in the cloud room, we can strengthen NIH’s knowledge ecosystem and accelerate data-driven investigation and discovery.”
Microsoft Azure joins Google Cloud and Amazon Internet Providers in supporting the STRIDES Initiative.
About the NIH Workplace of Facts Science Approach: The Office of Details Science System (ODSS) leads implementation of the NIH Strategic System for Information Science by way of scientific, technological, and operational collaboration with the institutes, facilities, and workplaces that comprise NIH. The business was fashioned in 2018 within the Division of Software Coordination, Arranging, and Strategic Initiatives, which designs and coordinates trans-NIH initiatives and study supported by the NIH Common Fund. A lot more data is obtainable at the Workplace of Details Science Technique web page: datascience.nih.gov.
About the Countrywide Institutes of Overall health (NIH):
NIH, the nation’s clinical investigate agency, consists of 27 Institutes and Centers and is a part of the U.S. Office of Wellbeing and Human Products and services. NIH is the major federal company conducting and supporting fundamental, scientific, and translational health care study, and is investigating the brings about, therapies, and cures for each frequent and uncommon conditions. For extra info about NIH and its plans, take a look at www.nih.gov.
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