Code Ocean Partners with the Allen Institute to Accelerate Neuroscience

Computational research platform’s self-service capabilities and interoperability increased workflow efficiency by 400% in less than one year

New York, NY – November 15, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/– Code Ocean, the world’s first Reproducible Research Cloud, today announced its ongoing partnership with the Allen Institute, based on a shared commitment to scientific discovery and open collaboration. Less than a year into their partnership, the Allen Institute has achieved a 4x increase in workflow efficiency, in addition to recognizing many other benefits of increased reproducibility, interoperability, and collaboration.

The Allen Institute is a Seattle-based independent nonprofit bioscience and medical research institute founded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen. Composed of five scientific units and more than 800 employees, the Allen Institute conducts large-scale research through foundational science to fuel the discovery and acceleration of new treatments and cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, cancer, addiction, and more. In keeping with its commitment to open science, one of the Allen Institute’s unique core values is to make all data and resources publicly available for external researchers and institutions to access and use.

Code Ocean accelerates life sciences, pharmaceutical, and biotech by providing one trusted place for researchers to share research data and computational assets, collaborate more quickly, and communicate more effectively. The first and only integrated library and workbench that preserves a record of all coding, data, and software used in computational research, Code Ocean’s digital platform guarantees reproducibility by maintaining complete visibility of the research lineage.

Since implementing Code Ocean, the Allen Institute has seen a dramatic increase in interoperability and productivity. With more than 100 researchers actively using the Code Ocean platform, the organization has achieved a 400% increase in workflow efficiency, enabling the research teams to accelerate the pace of discoveries.

“Code Ocean’s self-service capabilities make it easy for our scientists to do their work reproducibly,” said Dr. David Feng, Director of Scientific Computing, Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics. “New users to the platform can get far with just a little support, giving our engineers time to focus on domain-specific challenges.”

Code Ocean has developed a wide range of dedicated features to assist large organizations such as the Allen Institute to operate effectively at scale. These features include fine-grained custom metadata management and search, data organization in Collections, automated data provenance for trusted science and reproducibility, and integration with external data warehouse providers and leading machine learning platforms. One noteworthy statistic is the number of times scientists committed code to git (2,370 times) and the percentage of users committing to git (61%). These figures surpass what’s typically observed within the broader scientific community (Ram, 2013). This achievement has been made possible by Code Ocean’s dedicated UI features, which bypass the need for command-line operations requiring expertise in git.

These statistics show that the Allen Institute not only reaps the benefits of implementing these foundational technologies at a broad scale but also reinforces industry-standard best practices. Among other benefits, Code Ocean has empowered the Allen Institute to utilize machine learning on a broad scale, for the first time handling petabyte-scale data, with a growing user base of 282 users running more than 15,000 computations, totaling over 10,000 hours.

“Our partnership with Allen Institute has helped us to refine our ability to accommodate the specialized needs of large organizations,” said Dr. Daniel Koster, Director of Product at Code Ocean. “We have adapted our services to meet requirements such as handling petabyte-scale data, deploying FAIR-based analysis for reliable, scalable science, ensuring the reproducibility of scientific outcomes from experiment initiation to final presentation, complying with necessary regulatory standards, and providing a single pane of glass that integrates the multitude of tools utilized internally.”

For more information about Code Ocean, please visit codeocean.com/contact.

About Code Ocean

Code Ocean solves the problem of creative chaos in scientific discoveries. It’s your digital lab for faster, trusted computational science — the first and only integrated science library and workbench that guarantees reproducibility and speeds up discovery. Bringing together decision-makers, research IT, coding, and domain scientists in one shared, collaborative space, it provides a single pane of glass delivering end-to-end visibility, traceability, and reusability. Code Ocean keeps all your data, results, development environments, pipelines, AI/ML, no-code applications, and visualizations in one place as connected data products.