Collaborative efforts of scientific institutes from China work to build data centres for genomics.
On the 5th of June, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Finance jointly issued the “Notice on the optimization and adjustment list of the National Science and Technology Resource Sharing Platform”. It was also announced that the 20 National Science Data Centres known as National Centre will encompass various academic areas. Among them the construction of these data centres rely on the Beijing Genomics Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The construction also collaborates with the Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and the Institute of Biophysics (Chinese Academy of Sciences).
The National Centre aims to meet the need of genomic data organization in China. Some of the functions of the data centre include storage and management as well as development of data islands. Gathering genomic data from research on humans, animals, and microbes, enabling better management of genomic data. The National Centre hopes to build a data resource system and allowing it to be an open sharing platform for easy access to data services, empowering researchers with the resources for data mining, and data management. This will provide a consolidated resource for genomic data services allowing integrated data mining and shared access to genomic data.
With the strong foundation and background in genomic data, Beijing Genomics Research Institute will be able to build a data centre that will have direct influence on healthcare and genomic research. The data centre will hold a computing capacity of 150 trillion times per second and data storage capacity will look to reach 12 petabytes, which will contribute to protecting China’s genomic data and data security. This capacity it will allow the storage of genomic data of more than 200 scientific research projects including those from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation. Thereby supporting key research and development plans.
More than 130 of data management units will be constructed to support scientists in publishing research to international journals.
Beijing Genomics Institute plans to formulate a five-year construction and operations plans for the development and building of the National Centre. Thus, solving genomic data storage, management and sharing issues across institutions. [APBN]
Source: Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences