On July 14, 2022, the NCBI Education Team provided the workshop: An Introduction to NCBI Cloud Computing for Biologists. 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 to this growing industry. In this workshop, you will get hands-on experience with the AWS cloud environment using a combination of web-based and Linux command-line tools. We will guide you though a case study which involves aligning human sequence data to a reference sequence to identify variants associated with a genetic disorder. This workshop is designed for experimental biologists without cloud computing experience. While not required, it is most useful for researchers who do sequence-based research and who have some familiarity interacting with a Linux command-line.

In this online, interactive workshop, you will learn how to:

• Navigate the AWS cloud console page and understand how to access and use some popular console-based tools.
• Access and mine metadata for information in the NCBI SRA database to select an interesting dataset for further study using the AWS Athena service.
• Retrieve SRA sequence data and perform a sequence alignment analysis using the NCBI tool MagicBLAST.
• Visualize the aligned data against the wealth of information in NCBI databases by uploading it to the NCBI Genome Data Viewer browser application.

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.