Funding for “DataLife” Project: New node in European research infrastructure

A novel infrastructure for life science data: The project “DataLife - Data Infrastructure for Life Sciences”, coordinated by CUBE head Thomas Rattei, has now been approved by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research. It gets almost 1.9 million euros in funding and starts in January 2023. The new digital infrastructure will enable extensive, fast and secure storage of life science data by the Vienna BioCenter (VBC) entities and their partners. It will enable fast and robust connections from the users in the lab to existing Core Facilities and Computing Facilities. This will allow large amounts of life science data to be transferred with high bandwidth between analytical devices and high-performance data storage facilities, as well as between the data storage facilities and the relevant high-performance computing clusters for analysis and back. The project is tightly connected to the European research infrastructure ELIXIR.

Innovative life science research and teaching is increasingly based on large amounts of data. Modern analytical methods such as real-time microscopy or high-throughput chemical analytics generate large amounts of data in a short time. At the same time, these data are interpreted with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods, which require real-time access to large data sets and fast processing with special hardware. In recent years, numerous internationally outstanding capacities in the field of analytics and high-performance computing have been created by VBC institutions and their cooperation partners. However, this is offset by insufficient capacity, performance and connectivity with regard to data storage and data transfer. The “DataLife” project addresses these needs considering the demands of both data creation sites (e.g., researchers) and data processing sites (e.g., HPC operators).

The project is scheduled to run until the end of 2025. The operation of the infrastructure is expected to start at the beginning of the second year. After the end of the project period, the project partners will continue to operate the infrastructure.

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