About FDA

Description: In order to demonstrate options to the high cost of expanding and maintaining the internal high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure needed for Big Data analysis, the FDA Office of Health Informatics (under the leadership of the FDA Chief Health Informatics Officer) initiated the Chillax (see Chillax Website) pilot project working collaboratively with several other FDA components: CFSAN and the Office of Information Management (under the leadership of the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Technology Officer). The name “Chillax” was selected as a combination of “Chill” and “Relax,” as a comment on the anxiety this agency has when it comes to dealing with large scale computations, and how our resources fall short of meeting the demands. If you have this kind of problem, then “chill and relax” as the Chillax initiative can help provide you with options. This project takes advantage of the elastic computing power of a cloud environment to perform complex data retrieval, storage, and analysis such as that required for whole genome sequencing (WGS). It also allows researchers to use both open source and custom tools in an environment where resources are offered on demand. The successful pilot was completed by conducting a complex analysis of foodborne bacteria DNA, utilizing the HHS Cloud Computing environment, and comparing the results to using the local HPC. Chillax demonstrated that performing analyses on all of the publicly available Salmonella isolates (25,765) collected by the GenomeTrackr network could be completed successfully in the cloud in about an eighth of the time (20 hours, compared to 23 days) and for very modest cost compared to similar work done locally in an HPC environment. The efficiencies provided by Chillax will improve our abilities to protect public health, such as tracing foodborne outbreaks in a fraction of the time needed today. As a side benefit, the FDA cloud infrastructure that is being designed to support Chillax will also serve to provide cloud resources for many other FDA projects, which is one of the highest priorities identified by FDA Center scientists and the Scientific Computing Board.