Federated clouds for biomedical research: Integrating OpenStack for ICTBioMed

Increasingly complex biomedical data from diverse sources demands large storage, efficient software and high performance computing for the data's computationally intensive analysis. Cloud technology provides flexible storage and data processing capacity to aggregate and analyze complex data; facilitating knowledge sharing and integration from different disciplines in a collaborative research environment. The ICTBioMed collaborative is a team of internationally renowned academic and medical research institutions committed to advancing discovery in biomedicine. In this work we describe the cloud framework design, development, and associated software platform and tools we are working to develop, federate and deploy in a coordinated and evolving manner to accelerate research developments in the biomedical field. Further, we highlight some of the essential considerations and challenges to deploying a complex open architecture cloud-based research infrastructure with numerous software components, internationally distributed infrastructure and a diverse user base.