Minuteman - A versatile cloud computational platform for collaborative research

Secure platforms for bio-computation are critical to foster increasingly complex and data-intensive collaborations involving biomedical data. Here, we present Minuteman - an open-source cloud computing platform that can be securely used across organizations. Minuteman can be used for hosting data sources and running computational pipelines in an organized way. The platform consists of three fundamental features, 1) data operations including collaborative data processing and analytics, 2) customizable user access management for secure dissemination of the data, and 3) interactive exploration of the data through 3rd party (e.g. shiny, dashboard etc.) applications that can be scaled using docker containers. Strict data access rules and user-specific roles are applied across the whole platform to maintain data security. Minuteman is ideal for scenarios where data security, and privileged access are critical, such as industry-academia collaborations, and multi-institution consortiums. Using single-cell transcriptomics preprocessing, analyses and visualization pipelines across labs, we showcase the utility of the Minuteman platform for biomedical data analyses. Minuteman code is available at (https://github.com/hayatlab/minuteman)