Using BioShell: Accessing BioShell

Eligibility

BioShell is a national resource funded through NCRIS. BioShell is available to researchers across Australia. Read the criteria below to determine whether your project aligns with our core principles and resource criteria. 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 results and outputs, including data, software, and methods. We celebrate this work on the BioShell community and outcomes page.

2. Technical readiness and responsible resource use

Your team should have, or be actively building, the “hands-on” bioinformatics skills needed to make use of the environment.
Your resource usage must be planned and proportional as national infrastructure is finite.

3. Governance and leadership

You, or someone in your group, is able and willing to act as the project lead and be responsible for all resource usage and adherence to facility policies.

By submitting an access request you agree to the BioShell acceptable use policy and service terms, including the requirement to acknowledge BioShell in relevant research, training, and innovation outputs.

Request access to BioShell

Tip: BioShell runs on a single cloud environment, well suited to interactive work and moderate-scale pipelines. If you are running highly parallel or large batch jobs, a national HPC facility may be a better fit. The Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS) is a complementary programme that provides access to HPC infrastructure and expertise. To get a feel for the kinds of work each supports, browse some example BioShell and ABLeS projects, then see choosing an environment size for some worked examples for choosing your environment.

What’s supported?

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?

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

Note: The default storage quota is 100 GB, and you can request up to 1 TB with justification. Quotas are enforced at the infrastructure level, so it is not possible to exceed your allocation. To request more storage, contact BioShell support. Requests are subject to availability and review and cannot be guaranteed.

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.

Check out the project renewal form for more information or to make a request.

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.

Note: BioShell is the goto environment for running command-line training for details about workshops that have been run on BioShell see the BioShell community and outcomes page.

Connecting to BioShell

Once your environment is provisioned you will receive connection details by email. For step-by-step SSH connection instructions and information about your first login, see the Connecting to BioShell page.