Federated Analysis Work Stream (formerly Cloud Work Stream)

Standardises how researchers bring analysis to data by defining, sharing, and executing portable workflows to ensure secure and reproducible data access across federated environments

Overview

Summary Announcements

Modern cloud computing environments offer unprecedented access to large amounts of data, but the genomics and health communities have yet to take full advantage. The Federated Analysis Work Stream (formerly Cloud Work Stream) develops standards that help “bring the algorithms to the data” — running experiments in the cloud rather than downloading the data first. The Work Stream standardises how to securely define, share, and execute any portable workflows across federated environments, including public and private clouds, HPC, hybrid, and on-premises.

Announcements

Date	Title
4 August 2026	New Product in Action: Greater Bay Area Bioinformatics Center leverages GA4GH standards to navigate data sovereignty and advance genomic research in China
30 January 2025	GA4GH welcomes new Co-Leads for four Work Streams
3 September 2024	Leadership opportunity for the Cloud Work Stream
12 March 2024	Cloud Work Stream 2024 Roadmap is now available
12 May 2023	Welcome to the new GA4GH website!

Publications Documents Videos

Publications

Title	Author(s)	Year
Multimodal data curation via interoperability: use cases with the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center	Chen, W. et al. Chen, W., Whitney, H.M., Kahaki, S., Meyer, C., Li, H., Sá, R.C., Lauderdale, D., Napel, S., Gersing, K, Grossman, R.L., Giger, M.L.	2025
The GA4GH Task Execution Application Programming Interface: Enabling Easy Multicloud Task Execution	Kanitz, A. et al. Kanitz, A., McLoughlin, M.H., Beckman, L., Malladi, V.S., Ellrott, K.	2024
Sapporo: a workflow execution service that encourages the reuse of workflows in various languages in bioinformatics	Suetake, H. et al. Suetake, H., Tanjo, T., Ishii, M,., Kinoshita, B.P., Fujino, T., Hachiya, T., Kodama, Y., Fujisawa, T., Ogasawara, O., Shimizu, A., Arita, M., Fukusato, T., Igarashi, T., Ohta, T.	2022
Inverting the model of genomics data sharing with the NHGRI Genomic Data Science Analysis, Visualization, and Informatics Lab-space	Schatz, M.C. et al. Schatz, M.C., Philippakis, A.A,, Afgan, E., Banks, E., Carey, V.J., Carroll, R.J., Culotti, A., Ellrott, K., Goecks, J., Grossman, R.L., Hall, I.M., Hansen, K.D., Lawson, J., Leek, J.T., Mosher, S., Morgan, M., Nekrutenko, A., O’Connor, B.D., Osborn, K., Paten, B., Patterson, C., Tan, F.J., Waldron, L., Wang, T., Wuichet, K., and AnVIL Team.	2022
Executing workflows in the cloud with WESkit	Kensche, P.R. et al. Kensche, P.R., Kanitz, A., Topolsky, I., Jablonski, K.P., Mandreoli, P., Twardziok, S.	2021
BioContainers Registry: Searching Bioinformatics and Proteomics Tools, Packages, and Containers	Bai, J. et al. Bai, J., Bandla, C., Guo, J., Vera Alvarez, R., Bai, M., Vizcaíno, J.A., Moreno, P., Grüning, B., Sallou, O., Perez-Riverol, Y.	2021
Remote visualization of large-scale genomic alignments for collaborative clinical research and diagnosis of rare diseases	Corvò, A. et al. Corvò, A., Matalonga, L., Spalding, D., Senf, A., Laurie, S., Picó-Amador, D., Paramonov, I., Foix Romero, A., Garcia-Rios, E., Izquierdo Ciges, J,, Mohan, A., Thomas, C., Halmagyi, C., Freeberg, M.A., Töpf, A., Horvath, R., Saunders, G., Gut, I., Keane, T., Piscia, D., Beltran, S.	2020
Global Alliance for Genomics and Health Meets Bioconductor: Toward Reproducible and Agile Cancer Genomics at Cloud Scale	Carey, V.J. et al. Carey, V.J., Ramos, M., Stubbs, B.J., Gopaulakrishnan, S., Oh, S., Turaga, N., Waldron, L., Morgan, M.	2020
Htsget: A protocol for securely streaming genomic data	Kelleher, J. et al. Kelleher, J., Lin, M., Albach, C.H., Birney, E., Davies, R., Gourtovaia, M., Glazer, D., Gonzalez, C.Y., Jackson, D.K., Kemp, A., Marshall, J., Nowak, A., Senf, A., Tovar-Corona, J.M., Vikhorev, A., Keane, T.M.	2018
The Dockstore: Enabling modular, community-focused sharing of Docker-based genomics tools and workflows	O'Connor, B.O. et al. O'Connor, B.O., Yuen, D., Chung, V., Duncan, A.G., Liu, X.K., Patricia, J., Paten, B., Stein, L.D., Ferretti, V.	2017
Facilitating a Culture of Responsible and Effective Sharing of Cancer Genome Data	Siu, L.L. et al. Siu, L.L., Lawler, M., Haussler, D., Knoppers, B.M., Lewin, J.H., Vis, D.J., Liao, R.G.	2016

Documents

Date	Title
27 August 2024	GA4GH Updates Report — August 2024
24 May 2024	Meeting report: April Connect 2024
12 March 2024	2024 Cloud Work Stream Roadmap
7 November 2023	Meeting Report: September Connect 2023
19 September 2023	GA4GH Product Development and Approval Process
14 September 2023	Code of Ethics and Community Conduct (CECC)
14 September 2023	Guidelines for respectful engagement
14 September 2023	Procedures for reviewing reported violations of the Code of Ethics and Community Conduct
5 April 2023	Informational packet: getting involved with GA4GH
11 March 2023	Meeting minutes: Htsget
11 March 2023	Meeting minutes: Refget
11 March 2023	Meeting minutes: RNAget
10 March 2023	Start-up guide: refget
22 September 2020	Meeting minutes: Cloud (November 2020 to present)
8 June 2020	Cloud APIs comic (v4.0)

Videos

	Date	Title
	7 July 2021	Enabling federated discovery, access, and analysis of global datasets
	24 September 2020	GA4GH 8th Plenary: Cloud Work Stream 2020 Update
	16 November 2017	GA4GH 5th Plenary: creating technical tools for sharing genomic data (David Glazer)