NIH https://www.nih.gov has just launched the STRIDES initiative to harness the power of commercial cloud computing to provide NIH biomedical researchers access to advanced cost effective computational infrastructure tools, and services.
The Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability referred to as the STRIDES initiative was launched with Google Cloud as its first industry partner. The aim is to reduce economic and technological barriers to accessing and computing on large biomedical data sets.
STRIDES is going to broaden access to services and tools, plus include training for researchers to learn about the latest cloud tools and technologies. Services are expected to become available to the NIH supported community after a series of pilot activities are done to refine and test the policies, and then assess implementation approaches.
More than 2,500 academic institutions across the U.S with NIH support will make use of google Cloud’s storage, computing, and machine learning technologies. In addition, the partnership will collaborate with NIH’s Data Commons Pilot https://commonfund.nih.gov which consists of projects that test new tools and methods for working with and sharing data in the cloud. Eventually, training programs for NIH funded researchers will be established on using the Google Cloud Platform.
NIH’s initial efforts will focus on making NIH high-value data sets more accessible through the cloud to take advantage of data related innovations such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, plus experiment with new ways to optimize technology intensive research.
According to Andrea T. Norris, NIH Chief Information Officer and Director of NIH’s Center for Information Technology, “Beyond our partnership with Google Cloud, we will seek to add more industry partners to assure that NIH continues to be well poised to support the future of biomedical research.”