WORLD-LEADING MICROBIAL BIOINFORMATICS
CYBER-INFRASTRUCTURE

About Us

The CLIMB-BIG-DATA project (Cloud Infrastructure for Big Data Microbial Bioinformatics) is a collaboration between Warwick, Birmingham, Cardiff, Swansea, Bath and Leicester Universities, the MRC Unit the Gambia at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Quadram Institute Bioscience.

CLIMB-BIG-DATA is an ambitious 5-year initiative to deliver a cutting-edge scalable and dynamic bioinformatics platform to support academic research groups, government agencies and health service facing the challenges of big data in modern microbiology.  We provide cloud-based compute, storage, and analysis tools for microbiologists across the UK, accompanied by a wide range of bioinformatics training activities.

CLIMB-BIG-DATA is funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council through grant MR/T030062/1.

CLIMB, the CLIMB-BIG-DATA precursor, became an essential national capability for microbiologists in the UK, serving more than 900 users and over 300 research groups scattered across at least 85 research institutions—from Edinburgh to Exeter, from Belfast to Norwich—spanning universities and government agencies (e.g. PHE, PHW, APHA). CLIMB also won international recognition via 2017 HPC Wire Readers Choice Awards in Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences and Best HPC Collaboration in Academia, Government or Industry.

CLIMB was funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council through grant MR/L015080/1.

A paper describing CLIMB was published on Microbial Genomics in 2016.

To know more about CLIMB, here’s a video of Mark Pallen introducing the project during the launch event.