Geraldine Van der Auwera, Author at Terra

Flocking toward computational reproducibility: Highlights from our Birds of a Feather session at BOSC 2021

Geraldine Van der Auwera August 24, 2021

This blog shares highlights and key takeaways from the Birds of a Feather session at BOSC 2021. The discussion topic theme was computational reproducibility of published papers – which drew a great group of BOSC participants and led to some lively discussion, in the hope that some of the ideas we exchanged would live on beyond the close of the conference.

Speed up your workflows with N2 instances sporting Intel’s 2nd Generation Xeon CPUs

Geraldine Van der Auwera August 13, 2021

Terra’s workflow management system now allows you to use a newer model of Intel CPUs than what the system normally uses by default to execute workflow tasks. You’ll be able to request “N2 instances” instead of “N1 instances”, which use 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, codenamed “Cascade Lake”.

Terra in a nutshell: 2-minute video for newcomers

Geraldine Van der Auwera August 12, 2021

This week we highlight a new video we created to help newcomers understand what is Terra. The video summarizes why it makes sense to move biomedical data to the cloud, and outlines how Terra helps you access data, analyze it, and collaborate securely there.

Speed up your machine learning work with GPUs

Geraldine Van der Auwera August 4, 2021

Terra has offered the ability to use GPUs in workflows for quite some time, yet many of you have told us that you also need to be able to run GPU-enabled computations interactively, so we’re really excited to roll out GPU support for Jupyter Notebooks.

Tracking your workflow compute costs in Terra

Geraldine Van der Auwera July 29, 2021

This blog covers some key concepts and practical solutions for tackling the question of compute costs incurred by running workflows, which are typically the hardest to predict among the various types of cloud costs.

Try out R Shiny apps in Terra

Geraldine Van der Auwera July 20, 2021

We’ve added the ability to launch R Shiny apps from Terra’s built-in RStudio environment, opening up some really exciting possibilities for taking interactive data visualization in Terra to the next level.

Tell us what you need: Submit feature requests and vote on community ideas

Geraldine Van der Auwera July 8, 2021

Got any ideas for improving Terra? The Feature & Documentation Requests section of the Community forum is the best way to let us know what you’re thinking.

From infrastructure projects to connected communities: Building a cloud data ecosystem with deep roots

Geraldine Van der Auwera July 2, 2021

The cloud is the future of data sharing and collaboration. Yet to make it all work, it’s critical to provide appropriate tools and interfaces that streamline data access and analysis operations for researchers.

How Terra fits within the AnVIL ecosystem

Geraldine Van der Auwera June 17, 2021

We’ve mentioned the AnVIL project a number of times in recent blog posts — covering topics such as Dockstore, RStudio, Galaxy, and DRS URIs — so it feels like it’s high time that we gave you some more context. Specifically, we thought it might be useful to reiterate the key goals of the AnVIL project and explain briefly how Terra fits in with the other AnVIL components.

Embracing DRS URIs and the benefits of data interoperability standards

Geraldine Van der Auwera May 13, 2021

DRS stands for Data Repository Service API, one of the interoperability standards developed under the aegis of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). In this blog, we explain the big picture of what DRS is for and how it liberates you from having to worry about certain data management problems.