Enabling UK wheat research with the CyVerse UK cyberinfrastructure

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Bread wheat represents one of the most complex examples of a plant genome, as well as one of the most commercially important in the UK and internationally with over 750 million tonnes harvested annually, 14 million in the UK alone. This juxtaposition creates a range of challenges for biologists and data analysts - how can the balance between needing large amounts of data to answer complex biological questions about wheat genetics and the requirements for analysing this data and be found? Furthermore, the pressing issues of climate change that we face are all too evident. We need to use modern technology to increase productivity and output for our wheat researchers, drive breeding strategies, and benefit the public's nutritional needs.CyVerse represents such a technology, whereby computational resources, data storage, and analytical tools are made available through web-based graphical interfaces for end users or command line interfaces for power users or system administrators. CyVerse UK is the first implementation of the multi-million dollar CyVerse project outside the US, and both systems are interoperable, i.e. able to share their compute and storage services without the user needing to know where their analyses will be taking place. This federation allows a reduction in shared management cost, and an increase in productivity through shared expertise and software development.The use of "the cloud" is commonplace in today's internet era. Users are moving away from storing data on their own devices, but using services hosted by third party providers such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Furthermore, these vendors also supply complete computing environments over the internet, e.g. Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. However, these resources are not designed for the kinds of scale that are required for wheat researchers to make the most of publicly available and personal datasets, and the costs of running such environments are unclear at best and prohibitive at worst. Therefore, through the deployment of the proposed CyVerse Atmosphere cloud computing platform in the UK, we would be able to supply virtual server resources to users "elastically", i.e. elastic computing resources can be scaled up and down easily by users themselves. In this way, we can provide flexible computing power when and wherever required, to wheat researchers, labs, and breeders. These virtual wheat data analysis labs can be shared with a wider research group, even internationally, promoting collaboration and knowledge transfer.