FIRE is an internally developed, software-defined, geo-dispersed storage system, in which some of the most important data held at EMBl-EBI is stored (you can read more about it here).

FIRE provides a home for some of EMBL-EBI’s largest and most popular data resources. These include the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA), the PRoteomics IDEntifications Database (PRIDE), and the Bioimage Archive. These critical resources must remain highly available, performant and secure, and FIRE provides these things via mechanisms developed by the teams of our IT & Technical Services department.

December 2019 saw FIRE reach a new record of 70TB ingressed in a single day via the new HTTP API, smashing the previous record of 47TB. Both ENA and EGA would switch to using the new write system in 2020, resulting in a new one-day ingress record of 115TB in May.

EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and Google DeepMind today announced the renewal of their collaboration on the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AFDB) – a landmark partnership that continues to deliver high-quality protein structure predictions to the global scientific community.

To mark this continued partnership, the AlphaFold Database has launched a significant update, which synchronises it with the latest protein sequence data in UniProt, one of over 40 data resources managed and hosted by EMBL-EBI.