I’ve been working on a new project at work for a couple of months now, it’s another of those informatics projects that I seem to be doing more of nowadays. Obviously much time was spent coming up with the acronym – Biomedical Research Infrastructure Software Service kit. It is based up at the Glenfield Hospital with the Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit.

The main idea behind the project is to plug together a bunch of software packages and stick them on the cloud. We will then let other researchers come along and have an instance of our software stack at the click of button (well a few key stokes really). The obvious benefit being that it will take a few minutes to set up, as opposed to the few years it has taken to get the software to where it is now, and it will be centrally maintained – so no specialist IT skills will be needed.

We are currently going down the route of putting it on a VMWare backed cloud infrastructure, so my main responsibility (on account of being a linux geek) is to get it all into the cloud. Then we need to be able to monitor and manage it, so that’s in my domain also.

As you’d expect, we have a website and blog that we update on an irregular basis.