Enabling UK wheat research with the CyVerse UK cyberinfrastructure

面包小麦是植物基因组中最复杂的例子之一，也是英国和国际上最重要的商业作物之一，每年收获超过7.5亿吨，仅英国就收获1400万吨。这种并列给生物学家和数据分析师带来了一系列挑战——如何在需要大量数据来回答有关小麦遗传学的复杂生物学问题与分析这些数据并被发现的要求之间取得平衡？此外，我们面临的气候变化的紧迫问题是显而易见的。我们需要利用现代技术来提高小麦研究人员的生产力和产量，推动育种战略，并使公众的营养需求受益。CyVerse代表了这样一种技术，通过基于web的图形界面为最终用户提供计算资源、数据存储和分析工具，或者为高级用户或系统管理员提供命令行界面。CyVerse英国是美国以外第一个实施数百万美元CyVerse项目的地方，两个系统都是可互操作的，即能够共享它们的计算和存储服务，而用户不需要知道他们的分析将在哪里进行。这种联合允许减少共享管理成本，并通过共享专业知识和软件开发提高生产力。在当今的互联网时代，“云”的使用是司空见惯的。用户不再将数据存储在自己的设备上，而是使用第三方提供商（如b谷歌、Microsoft和Amazon）托管的服务。此外，这些供应商还通过互联网提供完整的计算环境，例如Amazon Web Services和Microsoft Azure。然而，这些资源并不是为小麦研究人员充分利用公共和个人数据集所需的那种规模而设计的，而且运行这种环境的成本往好了说是不清楚的，往坏了说是令人难以置信的。因此，通过在英国部署拟议的CyVerse Atmosphere云计算平台，我们将能够“弹性”地向用户提供虚拟服务器资源，即弹性计算资源可以由用户自己轻松伸缩。通过这种方式，我们可以随时随地为小麦研究人员、实验室和育种者提供灵活的计算能力。这些虚拟小麦数据分析实验室可以与更广泛的研究小组共享，甚至可以在国际上共享，从而促进合作和知识转移。

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.