de.NBI Cloud

The de.NBI Cloud is a federated cloud computing infrastructure for the sciences, operated by eight independent sites under a common governance by the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) since 2016. It has been operating in full production since 2018 and so far has provided resources to more than 1200 projects and more than 3500 users. Centrally operated services like the project application and management portal, as well as the first-level user help desk are complemented by cloud site-specific support. The annual cloud user meeting brings together our admins, application experts and users to learn how to best use the de.NBI Cloud and to present recent scientific applications that were realized with the de.NBI Cloud.

The de.NBI Cloud provides different services catering to different user needs:

1. (virtual) infrastructure-as-a-service with OpenStack

2. Container orchestration with Kubernetes

3. Self-service VREs as a service with SimpleVM

4. Workflows-as-a-service with Galaxy Europe

Since its foundation, de.NBI Cloud has provided the scientific and collaborative backbone for major new German initiatives such as NFDI and EOSC-Life in the European sector of computational biosciences. Above all, the cooperation with the European Life Science Infrastructure ELIXIR and various national NFDI consortia such as NFDI4Biodiversity, DataPLANT, GHGA, FAIRagro, or NFDI4Microbiota, as well as numerous users from universities and research institutes, showcases the power, range, and flexibility of the de.NBI Cloud, especially for the life science community.

In conclusion, de.NBI Cloud unlocks the full potential of research data and enables easier collaboration across different ecosystems and research areas, enabling scientists to innovate and scale up their data-driven research, not only in the life and computational biosciences but across diverse scientific domains.