About Bionimbus

Overview

Bionimbus is an open source cloud-based system for managing, analyzing and sharing genomic data that has been developed by the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology (IGSB) at the University of Chicago. Bionimbus is designed to support next-generation sequencing instruments and integrates technology for the analyzing and transporting large datasets. There is an open source version of Bionimbus available to those who wish to set up their own clouds. There is also a Bionimbus Community Cloud operated by the 501(c)(3) Open Cloud Consortium’s Open Science Data Cloud that includes a variety of public genomics and related data.

Bionimbus uses the Open Cloud Consortium’s Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC) for its infrastructure.  Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-prot supporting the scientic community by operating cloud infrastructure to support scientic, environmental, medical, and healthcare research. OCC currently distributes approximately 1 PB of scientic data to interested users and plans in each of the next several years to roughly double the amount of data that it distributes.

Most OCC users are at universities and institutes that are on Internet2 or National Lambda Rail.

OCC has received  $3M of equipment over the past two years from the Moore Foundation and Yahoo!. In addition, bandwidth to connect OCC data centers and OCC projects is provided by Cisco through the Cisco C-Wave. As of August 2012, OCC operates the following resources:

  • OSDC-Adler & Sullivan - OpenStack, Eucalyptus based cloud with 1248 cores and 1.2PB disk.  Funded by the Moore Foundation; 2000 cores and 3 PB disk to be added by November 2012
  • OCC-Y Hadoop data cloud - 928 cores and 1.0 PB disk Donated by Yahoo!
  • OSDC-Root – Storage cloud approximately 1 PB of disk.  Funded by Moore Foundation; 2 PB storage to be added by November 2012
  • Virtual machine images. We develop and maintain Bionimbus machine images that can be run on:i) The Bionimbus Community Cloud.ii) Public clouds such as Amazon’s.

    iii) Your own Eucalyptus or OpenStack-based private clouds.

  • Your own Bionimbus cloud. The Bionimbus system itself is open source and you can build your own private Bionimbus clouds.