The Genomics England Research Environment consists of two main platforms, a Linux Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) hosted by Inuvika and a High Performance Compute (HPC) cluster.

Research Environment Desktop

Browser compatibility

These are the recommended browsers to access the Research Environment Desktop. 

Login

You will need to use your Genomics England username and password to log in. If your credentials do not work, please contact the Genomics England Service Desk.

On login, you are presented with a Linux virtual desktop. The tools that are presented to you are explained in more detail in the Desktop Applications & Websites section.

Logout

To properly log out of the Research Environment, chose the logout option from the Applications menu or click on the small red button on the bottom left of the Research Environment desktop.

Properly logging out will apply any updates and/or fixes that have been applied to the Research Environment.

Use of the Research Environment desktop

The Research Environment desktop is best suited for light computational tasks, such as generating summaries from phenotypic data, doing simple LabKey queries and so on. All heavy compute tasks must be run on the Genomics England HPC . 

HPC Environment

The Research Environment virtual desktop provides access to software and tools but is connected to a limited amount of memory and processing power. Although this will be sufficient for using the available software and some low level analyses, it is expected that any intensive analyses will be run on Pegasus, the Genomics England High Performance Compute (HPC) cluster. To run such jobs you will need to connect to the login node and submit the job from there. For information on how to do this, read the section In-Depth Guide to HPC Usage.