Cancer Genome Collaboratory

The Cancer Genome Collaboratory is an academic compute cloud built by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. It allows researchers to run complex analysis operations across large International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) cancer genome data sets. It also hosts the world’s largest and most comprehensive cancer genome dataset, the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG).

The Collaboratory is also open to other research work that would benefit from a cloud computing environment.

The Collaboratory is home to the data holdings of the International Cancer Genome Consortium, a global collaboration involving more than 70 projects and 40 countries/jurisdictions created to sequence the genomes of 25,000 tumours and their matched normal tissues across 50 major cancer types. The Collaboratory is also home to the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) data which uniformly analyzed more than 2,600 cancer whole genomes from the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC). Collaboratory users have fast and easy access to these unique datasets.

Alternatively, Collaboratory users can upload their own datasets for analysis.

Using the Collaboratory’s computational facilities, researchers can run complex data mining and analysis operations across large datasets, such as the ICGC and PCAWG datasets. Using advanced metadata tagging, provenance tracking, and workflow management software, researchers can execute complex analytic pipelines, create reproducible traces of each computational step, and share methods and results. Instead of spending weeks to months downloading hundreds of terabytes of data from a central repository before computations can begin, researchers can upload their analytic software to the Collaboratory cloud, run it, and download the computed results in a secure fashion.