iRODS Consortium welcomes UK’s Sanger Institute as newest member

CHAPEL HILL, NC - Feb 19, 2014 - The iRODS Consortium today announced the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a leading institution in the Human Genome Project now focused on understanding the role of genetics in health and disease, as its newest member. The Sanger Institute is located in Hinxton, UK, near Cambridge.

The iRODS Consortium formed about a year ago with RENCI (the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) and Germany's Max Planck Society as its founding members. The consortium works to bring together universities, research organizations, businesses, and government agencies to guide the continued development of the iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) data management platform, obtain funding to support that development, and broaden the iRODS user community.

iRODS is a popular, highly-configurable, open source technology used in multiple high-demand production sites globally for data management, sharing and integration. It was developed by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Group at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). RENCI software developers work with DICE on continued development and improvement of iRODS.

"We are delighted to join the iRODS Consortium," said Guy Coates, PhD, informatics systems group team leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "We need efficient management systems to ensure that our large-scale datasets are of value. We study genomes in order to improve human health and need to make sure we can produce, manage and use genome information as efficiently as possible."

Brand Fortner, PhD, director of the iRODS Consortium and a senior researcher at RENCI, said the addition of the Sanger Institute to the consortium marks the start of what should be a busy year for the iRODS community.

 "A lot is happening in the iRODS community this year," said Fortner. "We are moving toward one code base that is extensively tested and has the reliability of commercial open source software, and we are building a community through the iRODS Consortium that will help guide future development. Sanger will be an extremely valuable member of the consortium. They have an international reputation in genomics and understand the needs of genomics researchers, who routinely deal with huge, complicated data sets."

For more information on the iRODS Consortium, see irods-consortium.org.