About us
A repository run by the cohorts that fill it
Helixbank is a non-profit foundation governed by the studies whose data it holds.
Origin
Governance before infrastructure
Every cohort that contributes keeps control of its own access decisions. We provide the archive, the enclave and the plumbing; the committees decide who gets in. That order matters — a repository that takes governance seriously is the only kind participants should consent to.
- Non-profit foundation, funded by member institutions and grants
- Each cohort's committee decides on its own data
- Aggregate decisions and takedowns published annually
Four cohorts, one server room
The first shared archive.
Data access committees formalised
Governance model published.
Analysis enclave
Compute moves to the data.
Beacon and htsget
Discovery without access.
1.4 million genomes
84 PB, 41 cohorts.
How we work
Boring on purpose
We would rather run software that is three years old and understood than something new that pages us at 04:00.
Own the path
We buy transit from multiple carriers and peer directly wherever it is possible, so a single bad hop is never a single point of failure.
Write it down
Every incident gets a public write-up. Every design decision gets an RFC. Institutional memory beats heroics.
Some of the people behind it
A quarter of the company has been here since the first rack.