It’s incredible that Terra, along with its predecessor, FireCloud, have been in development for over nine years. In that time, Terra has grown far beyond our original vision, playing a critical role in areas like public health surveillance, ‘omics’ data delivery, biobank data management, and rare disease diagnosis.
We’ve spent the last several months mapping out a strategy to evolve Terra for the future. Together with leading scientists at the Broad Institute and our collaborators, we’ve been imagining how research will be done in the next five to ten years, and how Broad’s Data Sciences Platform (DSP) can deliver on what you’ll need to drive discovery in the next decade. In this blog post, we’re excited to share our plans and give a teaser on some of our future capabilities. Let’s start by looking at some of these capabilities for the biological research use case.
Future Platform Capabilities:
- Supporting all major clouds: Organizations store scientific data in a variety of cloud platforms, but users shouldn’t have to worry about where the data resides. We need to support multiple clouds and make it easy for users to work across them cost-effectively.
- Support for more workflow languages: Not all users write WDL. Nextflow’s popularity has soared, for example, so we want to support it while also making it easier to support any new workflow languages that come along.
- Scaling data tables and workflow execution: Over the years, Cromwell, Terra’s workflow execution engine, has done an impressive job handling massive scales of data. As data continue to grow and new types of data emerge, however, we need to scale even further. This is why we’re focused on building a platform that’s not only better at handling more data, but also evolves with the changing landscape of scientific research.
- Advancing the researcher’s lifecycle with Al agents: Al agents could assist with cohort building, data analysis, scientific literature searches and much more. To improve the speed of research, we need to include more of these capabilities natively.
- Enhanced data management capabilities: From ingestion and harmonization to discovery and access — organizing and managing data needs to be easier than it is today.
As we look to build these capabilities in the years to come, we want to continue to work with innovative partners who can help accelerate engineering. To help bring these capabilities to life, we’re excited to announce a strategic collaboration with Manifold. Their technical expertise and shared vision will be crucial in helping us deliver on these goals and positioning us for a scalable and innovative future.
Manifold is a technology company focused on building advanced, modern cloud infrastructure for biomedical science. Manifold started in the cancer research space, where they demonstrated the effectiveness of their research cloud infrastructure in partnerships with leading organizations such as the American Cancer Society (ACS) and Indiana University.
We’re working with Manifold on a new platform, one that’ll incorporate Terra’s features while adding new functionality to help address the needs discussed above. Like Terra, this new platform will act as a steward— not an owner —of scientific data, ensuring users retain full ownership and control over access, while providing high levels of data security. Manifold will focus on building the core platform infrastructure while we in Broad’s DSP will develop advanced open-source analysis tools and capabilities at the cutting edge of biomedical science and then make them available to everyone via the platform. You can read more about this collaboration in a press release we shared earlier today.
And, we remain hard at work improving the Terra platform that you use today to support your science. For example, soon you’ll be able to cap the cost of a workflow—allowing you to have more control over your spend in Terra when running workflows. To read more about other features that are coming, check out our new public roadmap. The goal of the roadmap is to invite your feedback and ideas on what we’re building, while also clearly outlining our upcoming plans. You can even sign up to be an early tester of new features.
We’re excited to collaborate more with all of you — and Manifold — in 2025. Thank you for making Terra a critical tool for so many groundbreaking projects. Check out our FAQs about this collaboration and if you have any other questions, please feel free to reach us at support@terra.bio.
Happy New Year!
