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About ABLeS
The ABLeS (Australian BioCommons Leadership Share) program was established in April 2021 to more readily support data-driven bioinformatics. This effort is supported by Australian BioCommons in partnership with Bioplatforms Australia, National Computational Infrastructure (NCI, Canberra), and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre (Pawsey, Perth).
ABLeS targets established groups and communities that are focused on a common research theme, create reference data and/or software, and have the ability to plan and prioritise a computational research program.
ABLeS projects broadly align with the following three principles:
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They are life science related and are producing and sharing data, research, or software centric outcomes.
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The project users have expertise which will drive and execute its bioinformatics agenda of the project.
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Resources are planned and approached with a level of care appropriate to their status as limited and consumable resources.
The support available includes access to computational and data infrastructure, specialist expertise, support to adopt best practices and share outputs effectively, and a community led and shared repository of bioinformatics software (i.e. tools and workflows).
More details are available in the ABLeS publication:
Gustafsson, Ove Johan Ragnar, Al Bkhetan, Ziad, Francis, Rhys & Manos, Steven. (2023). Enabling national step changes in bioinformatics through ABLeS, the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (3.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10139651
You can also watch a 10 minute overview of ABLeS on the Australian BioCommons YouTube Channel:
ABLeS project types
Creation of reference data assets
ABLeS reference data allocations support research groups and consortia within the life sciences to access the dedicated compute capacity required to efficiently construct reference data.
Production bioinformatics
Institutes, consortia and core facilities are increasingly facing issues scaling their in-house compute and data infrastructure to the questions, sample sizes, and data set sizes they are addressing as part of their research programs. ABLeS production allocations support these groups to implement and run their computational workflow approaches for omics data analysis at scale.
Software accelerator
Software accelerator allocations will directly support the further development, installation, optimisation, testing and/or benchmarking of bioinformatics software. These allocations are intended to create a culture of best practice in software, helping bioinformaticians to effectively share and document their work, and make it FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).
Acknowledgements
ABLeS is co-funded by Bioplatforms Australia, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. This program forms part of the national Australian BioCommons infrastructure.
