Since the technology first appeared, data-intensive computing researchers at CRS4 have been exploring the potential impacts of infrastructure automation and programmability on its activities.
As an example, in 2016 CRS4 contributed to the creation of the PhenoMeNal e-infrastructure for scalable metabolomics data analysis, which can be trivially deployed and torn down by a user through its graphical façade, on any compatible cloud infrastructure service. This solution provides a great level of flexibility: researchers can rapidly instantiate their own data analysis platform on a pay-per-use basis, with no capital investment or maintenance. Moreover, the automated procedure ensures the reproducibility of the configuration of the e-infrastructure and thus of the analyses that are executed on it.
- Kristian Peters, ..., Marco Enrico Piras, Luca Pireddu, ...., Gianluigi Zanetti, Christoph Steinbeck. PhenoMeNal: processing and analysis of metabolomics data in the cloud. GigaScience, Volume 8, Issue 2, February 2019, giy149, doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giy149
