National Facility for Data Handling & Analysis

National Facility for Data Handling & Analysis

The mission of the National Facility for Data Handling and Analysis is to support the national research community by providing state-of-the-art analysis of biological datasets generated by high-throughput genomic and imaging technologies. The main objective of this National Facility is to provide the bioinformatics and bioimage analysis expertise in the interpretation of complex, large-scale biomedical datasets.

The National Facility for Data Handling and Analysis foresees three Infrastructural Units:

• IU1 – Bioimage Analysis: This unit provides high-quality image analysis solutions, including Quality Control (QC), denoising and image restoration, segmentation, and basic quantification for imaging data. It also develops and maintains new open source image analysis tools that are released to the broader community and included in the service portfolio.
• IU2 – Omics Analysis: This unit performs the analysis of “omics” data generated by other Facilities or by external sources. Basic services include QC, alignment to reference genomes, as well as calculations of read counts and/or variant calling. In-depth analysis can be provided on a project-specific basis.
• IU3 – Technology Development – DevOps and Web development: This unit focuses on providing installable and containerised versions of the tools and pipelines developed by the Facility, as well as creating and maintaining user-friendly WebApps providing services to the scientific community.

All three units of the National Facility for Data Handling and Analysis engage in technology development, creating re-usable research software for use within the Facility, and enabling the deployment of novel resources that users will be able to “take home” to their own institutions. Technology development ensures that the Facility remains state-of-the-art and adapts organically to the needs of the research community.

Another main pillar of the Facility is the provision of training for the users through workshops and in-depth courses, allowing users to take the acquired knowledge back to their home institutions and creating national awareness of our service portfolio.

The National Facility for Data Handling and Analysis is supported by a large Data Centre and Scientific Computing infrastructure initially composed of an HPC system (over 100 compute nodes, 30 GPU nodes, 20 PB of storage space) combined with access to cloud-based resources.