The French Institute of Bioinformatics (IFB) is a national service infrastructure in bioinformatics constituted of 35 bioinformatics platforms spanning the entire territory.
The principal mission is to provide an integrates and sustains bioinformatics resources and services across the life science community.
These services can be grouped in:
The IFB-Infrastructure coupled to the required computing and storage capacity in a national bioinformatics cloud. To address the most common needs, a selection of major scientific software tools was made and they were installed in pre-configured virtual images (cloud appliances), ready to run on the IFB’s cloud (biosphere). IFB is also using the lightweight virtualization based on Docker containers to provide bioinformatics tools and pipelines ready to run in the cloud or locally to personalize their virtual research environment. One of the most widely adopted images/containers coming from Galaxy.
The IFB also contributes for structuring and organizing the French bioinformatics community on emergent needs like Galaxy platforms. At the National level, IFB member is gathering in the French Galaxy Working. The objective of this working group is to federate the French bioinformatics community of developers working on the Galaxy environment. This working group activities are related to the 3 following topics: