The aim of the BeYond-COVID project (By-COVID) is to make COVID-19 data collected in different European countries available to researchers, hospitals and public administrations.
A portal with COVID-19 data is available on the By-COVID project website.
The project is coordinated by the ELIXIR infrastructure, whose member organisation EMBL-EBI has compiled the main coronavirus datasets on the portal. Researchers can use the portal to analyse the COVID-19 reference data. It contains more than 8 million COVID sequences.
The Research Council of Finland funded the Finnish ELIXIR Node’s CSC experiment, where data from the COVID 19-portal was analysed and tested on the Finnish LUMI supercomputer. The work supports the By-COVID project: an important role of the CSC is to promote the use of supercomputers in data-intensive computing.
According to Tommi Nyrönen, Director of the ELIXIR Finland node, the project overcame many of the technical challenges of data management.
“Computational work at the EMBL-EBI European Bioinformatics Institute enabled the analysis of the COVID-19 viral data, and this work was done in collaboration with experts from the CSC and EMBL-EBI. With European supercomputing, we can now transfer hundreds of thousands of virus data points daily between computing centres with the help of European research networks.”
As a result, the capacity of a supercomputer will be needed in the future to analyse all the data.
“This is essential for a rapid response in the event of a new pandemic, and also to update the data available on the COVID-19 portal.”
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ELIXIR is partly funded by the European Commission