The unparalleled new service is designed around microbiologists’ needs. It provides a cutting-edge scalable and dynamic bioinformatics platform to support academic research groups, government agencies and health services facing the challenges of big data in modern microbiology.

To introduce their revolutionary research environment, CLIMB-BIG-DATA will be hosting a pop-up event at the Birmingham Library on Monday 17 April, coinciding with the Microbiology Society Annual Conference, giving the UK’s microbiology community the opportunity to meet the team and see the new platform in action.

The CLIMB-BIG-DATA (Cloud Infrastructure for Big Data Microbial Bioinformatics) project was established in 2020 with support from the Medical Research Council, to allow all microbiologists across the UK access to the latest, most powerful computing, storage and analysis tools needed to understand the wealth of Big Data next-generation sequencing projects generate.

Hundreds of microbiologists in dozens of organisations have benefited from access to the platform, as most organisations don’t have access to bioinformatic resources at the scale, power and breadth contained within the CLIMB-BIG-DATA platform.

The new platform features new tools in a new usage framework and is being launched on a subscription model that offers increased flexibility to further boost team productivity. Users can now collaborate on a project within an online notebook with ease, picking up where they left off the day before. When resources are not in use, they are automatically released back to the community, freeing up capacity.

Professor Mark Pallen from the Quadram Institute and Director of the CLIMB-BIG-DATA project, said, “We are extremely proud of the service we are announcing and of the relentless work we have done so far to reach this point. We are taking our first steps towards making CLIMB-BIG-DATA self-sustaining, and we want to showcase our beautiful service to as many microbiologists as possible.”

CLIMB-BIG-DATA’s research environment provides virtually endless possibilities to meet the research needs of students and beginners as well as advanced, experienced bioinformaticians.

With powerful GPUs, CPUs, databases, and a range of tools and pipelines, CLIMB-BIG-DATA’s new service provides something for everyone, including Jupyter Notebooks, RStudio, Python, Conda, and a terminal with ready-to-use pipelines.

CLIMB-BIG-DATA will be hosting a pop-up event at the Birmingham Library on Monday 17 April. Attendees will have the chance to see the new service in action, discuss individual solutions and prices, and chat with the team in an informal, friendly setting.

The CLIMB-BIG-DATA project is a collaboration between Warwick, Birmingham, Cardiff, Swansea, Bath and Leicester Universities, the MRC Unit The Gambia at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Quadram Institute

•  Register for the CLIMB-BIG-DATA pop-up event on 17 April