Our Team

The team is composed of 4 sub-teams; Operations – providing operational support (and development) of key services and software development; FIRE – maintaining and updating the EMBL-EBI File Replication Archive; Software Development – providing development and maintenance of some internal software projects and externally-funded software collaborations, as well as maintaining and developing the EMBL-EBI Resource Usage Portal; and Job Dispatcher Services; maintaining and developing the Job Dispatcher sequence analysis tools. 

We are a diverse team, employing a mix of software developers (java, python, full-stack), site reliability engineers and DevOps engineers.  We use Agile-based methodologies for most projects. 

Our Projects

The current Operations services and projects include the following:

• FIRE is the archiving infrastructure behind major sequence and image archives including ENA, EGA, UK Biobank and BioImaging.  It reliably stores long-term files redundantly in both disc and tape-based object stores.
• Centralised File Transfer Services used to move data in and out of EMBL-EBI. Protocols supported include ftp, http, Aspera, Globus Connect Server (gridftp).
• SCORE is an application used by the ITS to manage the account lifecycle.
• EBI Cloud Portal offers simplified access to cloud-based resource configurations and forms part of the BioExcel portal.  
• Resource Request, Allocation and Usage Service (RUP) supports, within ITS, requests for resources, the allocation process and recording the usage.
• The Authentication and Authorisation User Profile (AAP) service, used by various EMBL-EBI services, notably the PRIDE archive for user account management and Single Sign On.
• Participation in Hybrid Cloud/Container Orchestration activities related to GA4GH (and GA4GH ELIXIR) cloud WS component development.

Our Collaborators

We work closely with a number of service teams within EMBL-EBI, as well as with all teams that comprise IT & Technical Services. 

Our current external collaborations are with:

• BioExcel (https://bioexcel.eu/)
• EOSC-Life (https://www.eosc-life.eu/)
• ELIXIR – (https://elixir-europe.org/) particularly the compute platform – (https://elixir-europe.org/platforms/compute)
• Human Cell Atlas – (https://www.humancellatlas.org/)
• UK Biobank   – https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/) 
• GA4GH – https://www.ga4gh.org  (cloud workstream)