On Monday 23 March, The Government and the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser announced a £20 million initiative to map how COVID-19 spreads and evolves. The COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK) brings together clinicians and scientists who share a commitment to fight this and future pandemics.
COG-UK is a collaborative network that involves NHS, Public Health Agencies and academic institutions from the United Kingdom; it will deliver large scale, rapid sequencing of the cause of the disease and share intelligence and knowledge with hospitals, regional NHS centres and the Government.
The Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics, CLIMB, which recently secured funding for a further five years with the CLIMB-BIG-DATA project, provides the resources to analyse the enormous amount of data produced by the consortium. CLIMB gives access to data analysis pipelines, computing and storage capacity to the consortium, and the possibility of sharing data facilitates national and international research collaborations.
COG-UK researchers can access hundreds of CPUs, thousands of gigabytes of RAM and tens of terabytes of storage. CLIMB dedicated Cloud Computing Managers work constantly to spare the end user from worrying about technical issues, and to optimize the utilization of hardware.