On February 8, 2022, the NCBI Education Team provided the workshop: An Introduction to NCBI Cloud Computing for Virologists. Training materials from this event are available on this page.

As DNA sequencing becomes a commonplace tool in biological research, the need for accessible, scalable, and secure computational environments to process this deluge of data is growing. NCBI has partnered with leading cloud computing providers to provide tools and data for this growing industry.

This workshop is designed for virologists without cloud computing experience. While not required, it will be most helpful for researchers who do sequence-based research and who have some familiarity interacting with the Linux command-line.

In this workshop, you will learn to:

• Navigate the AWS cloud console page and understand how to access and use some popular console-based tools.
• Use the AWS Athena service to mine SRA metadata for viral information to identify an interesting dataset for further study.
• Employ MagicBLAST and the AWS Batch service to align and call consensus sequences from SRA sequence data.
• Visualize and interactively examine the aligned data using NCBI’s Multiple Sequence Alignment Viewer.

Keyboard controls: Space bar - toggle play/pause; Right and Left Arrow - seek the video forwards and back; Up and Down Arrow - increase and decrease the volume; M key - toggle mute/unmute; F key - toggle fullscreen off and on.