Digital data curation and security is traversal to all institutional operations. Investment in computing infrastructure remains ongoing and provides secure redundant backup of critical research and administrative data. The bioinformatics unit also provides training and policy advice with regards to Open Science, FAIR data practices, and data management, stewardship, and research reproducibility.

Making digital research products and resources freely available is central to our digital strategy, and we achieve this by adhering to the principle that research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) and by following the principles of Open Science as promoted by ELIXIR and EOSC-Life.

CCMAR bioinformaticians can provide support and technical advice for data analysis (e.g. genomic technologies), workflow construction and execution, containerisation and virtualisation, and databasing. The unit currently includes two personnel with a specialised bioinformatic and data science research background. At a national and European level, we contribute to the goals of BioData.pt, ELIXIR, EMBRC.pt, and EOSC-Life ESFRI infrastructures.

The CCMAR institutional computing infrastructure is housed in the UAlg Datacentre and consists of 15 physical machines with 392 virtual CPUs and 52TB of redundant data storage. Resources in the infrastructure are virtualised in a hypervisor giving greater flexibility of response to the changing needs in digital resources.
 

In 2021, five web-services were deployed, including a SeaGrassTrait Database and EOSC-Life Marine Genomics Portal VMs, and three running institutional administration services, and a further. CETA (ceta.ualg.pt) is the CCMAR high-performance computing cluster, and is provided as a service to institutional members, RI's, and collaborators.
 

The HPC is currently configured with 336 cpus, 1.672TB memory (1TB max/process), and 50TB of redundant storage, configured with a SLURM queuing system, and a single machine with 1TB of random-access memory. The computing infrastructure can also provide virtual machines (VM) as a service, and currently hosts 12 VMs for projects and web-services, including marineforests.com, and seagrasses.ccmar.ualg.pt.

For more information contact: ccmarcts@ualg.pt