What is CyVerse UK?

CyVerse UK was born a major collaboration between scientists at the University of Arizona, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the Earlham Institute (EI), the University of Warwick, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Nottingham to setup a UK based node for CyVerse. The aim is to provide researches in the UK/EU geographical advantageous access to HTC resources for life science. The Warwick University have provided a number of applications for sequence conservation, enrichment analyses, genome-wide chromatin data and time series expression data analyses. Most of these applications currently run on the US hardware, but we are now in the process of duplicating them so that you can run them in the EI execution system too. The Ealrham institute hosts the hardware and DevOps staff. Other bioinformatics software were developed at EI and are now available to CyVerse UK users.

How are CyVerse UK and CyVerse related?

CyVerse UK represents the first node of CyVerse outside the United States, and it’s funded independently from the parent project. We are currently working on a full federation of the UK and US systems, which will give users a seamless experience with the possibility to run their jobs and store their data in the most favourable location. This means that resources such as the Data Store will remain separate, but will be connected to allow users access to transfer and use data within the Discovery Environment and through the Agave API.

I work in the UK. Can I use CyVerse UK?


Users are able to use their CyVerse login to access UK services.
You can email us at cyverseuk@earlham.ac.uk to get help from a UK team member, or head to the US CyVerse help pages. If you are a developer and want to contribute (that’s great!) or you would like us to host your application on our platform, check out our Github Wiki for some tips.

What is our vision?

The UK CyVerse node can potentially support a large proportion of the UK biological sciences community’s data requirements, from genomics to phenomics. It will enable UK researchers to access extensive data storage/back-up, local and global compute power, and structured, integrated analysis applications and workflows. It will also allow BBSRC-funded tools to become available globally and will help build a common international biological science platform that prevents duplication of effort and funding. In doing so, rational and supported reuse of data, applications and resources is encouraged. CyVerse UK will also democratise UK science so that research groups lacking capacity to build close working relationships with experts from other disciplines can work on large datasets using publicly available workflows in a single online location with consistent rules, formatting and required skills level. In establishing the first CyVerse mirror outside the US, CyVerse UK will help spread the reliability and cost associated with CyVerse in the long term. It will also help share knowledge and best practice between the US and UK, and will acts a flagship projects for other national CyVerse nodes in the future.

Where is CyVerse UK based?

The computational hardware infrastructure for CyVerse UK is set up at the Earlham Institute (EI) in Norwich. EI provides a National Capability for computational infrastructure, and as such is perfectly situated to provide the foundations for the CyVerse UK node. Software tools developed for specific plant science sequencing, systems biology and image analysis projects at the Universities of Warwick, Liverpool and Nottingham, as well as tools developed at EI itself, will be adapted by a dedicated team of programmers so that they can be integrated into CyVerse UK. These will then be made freely and openly available for the wider plant science community to use.