Christophe Blanchet (M), PhD in Bioinformatics/Biochemistry, is a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), working at the French Institute of Bioinformatics (IFB).
He is participating in the research domain of distributed computing for life sciences since 2001. From 2004 to 2010, he was member of the European EGEE Grid infrastructure, chairing the Bioinformatics Applications Activity (NA4-Bioinformatics). From 2005 to 2010, he took an active role in the Bioinformatics Network of Excellence EMBRACE (European Model for Bioinformatics Research and Community Education, EU-FP6). As the representative of CNRS IBCP, the bioinformatics partner in the StratusLab project, he managed the definition of the requirements and evaluated the developments of bioinformatics use cases in the cloud.
Currently, Christophe Blanchet is leading the e-infrastructure team of the IFB, with the main goal of setting up a national academic cloud devoted to life sciences, then federating the national core resources with the regional centers.

Bioinformatics Cloud Services for Life Sciences
In recent years, many research infrastructures devoted to the life sciences were set up at the French and European levels, producing huge quantities of experimental data to be analyzed. These data are generally described using different formats depending on their domain, and require large-size public reference databases from many different sources (more than one thousand) for their analysis. A great many software tools are often required to analyze the wide range of domains, and sometimes even within a single domain. In the same way, the interfaces to be built cover the whole spectrum: from the command line interface to the web portal, and including software with a graphical user interface.

The French Institute of Bioinformatics (IFB), ELIXIR French node, aims to provide scientists with bioinformatics services relying on the required computing and storage capacities while providing a user-friendly and easily adjustable solution. A selection of bioinformatics software and pipelines have been integrated as turnkey cloud services, now available to scientists.