Department of Biotechnology-Integrated Computing Environment (DBT-ICE)
Integrated Computing Environment (ICE) is a national cloud-based computational facility for bioinformatics funded by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India. It aims towards development of a scalable and portable on any cloud-based distributed computing platform coupled with big data analytics tools capable of analyzing next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. DBT-ICE offers a unique combination of data-repository and data analysis platforms to enable better use of data through encrypted access for the research community in India. ICE-cube, a cloud-based infrastructure has been commissioned which is equipped with ICE-flakes facility for containerized data analysis thus, reducing the burden of repetitive data downloads and storage.
Architecture of DBT-ICE
DBT-ICE provides pre-installed tools and software packages along with options for downstream data piping and visualization of results. It not only provides pre-defined bioinformatics pipelines but also gives the freedom to install customized pipelines in Docker and Jupyter Notebook environments giving researchers an advanced bioinformatics experience. The functionality of containerized data analysis on DBT-ICE allows users to define their computational requirements in terms of memory, space, and the number of parallel processors. This empowers the users to estimate and control the time required for their analysis and motivates them to plan their projects.
Through this initiative of DBT-ICE, the Bioinformatics team at the High-Performance Computing Group, C-DAC, Pune looks forward to building and nurturing a highly interactive community of researchers and scientists from all the domains of life sciences bringing together universities and research organizations across the country.
DBT-ICE facility (ICE-CUBE) at C-DAC premises