Eligibility
BioShell is available to researchers across Australia. To qualify for access, your project must address the following:
1. Domain and impact
- Your work must have a molecular life sciences focus
- Where appropriate, you are willing to openly share your research stories on the BioShell community and outcomes page
2. Technical readiness and responsible resource use
- Your team should have, or be actively developing the “hands-on” bioinformatics skills needed to make use of the environment
- Your workloads can run with computational resources outlined here
By submitting an access request you agree to the BioShell acceptable use policy and service terms, including the requirement to acknowledge BioShell in your publications and training materials.
If you are running batch processing workloads with little need for interactivity, an HPC may be a better fit. The Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS) is a complementary programme that provides access to National HPC infrastructure.
Supported projects
| User type | Description |
|---|---|
| Research projects | Academic, government, or industry life-science research with defined outcomes |
| Development projects | Bioinformatics tool or workflow development intended for community use |
What does access include?
The default storage quota is 100 GB, and you can request up to 1 TB with justification. To request more storage, contact BioShell support. Requests are subject to availability and review and cannot be guaranteed.
| Research | Development | |
|---|---|---|
| Data analysis and visualisation | Yes | Yes |
| Interactive interfaces (JupyterLab, RStudio) | Yes | Yes |
| SSH CLI access | Yes | Yes |
| Storage quota | 100 GB (default) | 100 GB (default) |
| Allocation period | 3 months | 3 months |
| Renewal | Yes, subject to review | Yes, subject to review |
Access duration and renewal
For research and development projects access is granted for 3 months and is renewable. Renewal requires demonstrated usage and continued progress against the aims stated in your original application.
Complete the project renewal form for more information or to make a request.
Choose a flavour
To decide what VM environment resources best fit your research, see choosing the right environment.
Submit your application
To request access to BioShell, you will need to provide us with some details about your project, your VM environment resource requirements, and your project group members.
BioShell’s capacity is a finite allocation from our infrastructure partners, so approval does not always mean immediate provisioning. See service capacity for more.
Training events
If you are planning a workshop or training event and wish to use BioShell, contact the BioCommons Training Team. Check out the Australian BioCommons event support page for additional information on how we support training.
BioShell is the environment Australian BioCommons uses for all command-line-based training. For details about workshops that have been run on BioShell see the BioShell community and outcomes page.