CellHeap – a workflow for optimizing COVID-19 single-cell RNA-Seq data processing

Currently, several hundreds of Terabytes of COVID-19 single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data are available in public repositories. This data refers to multiple tissues, comorbidities, and conditions.  This trend is expected to continue, and it is realistic to predict amounts of COVID-19 scRNA-seq data increasing to several Petabytes in the coming years. However, thoughtful analysis of this data requires large-scale computing infrastructures, and software systems optimized for such platforms to generate biological knowledge. Researchers at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation have developed CellHeap, a portable and robust workflow for scRNA-seq customizable analyses, with quality control throughout the execution steps and deployable on supercomputers. The researchers present the deployment of CellHeap in the Santos Dumont supercomputer for analyzing COVID-19 scRNA-seq datasets, and discuss a case study that processed dozens of Terabytes of COVID-19 scRNA-seq raw data.