As announced on the GATK blog:
With the GATK4 release just around the corner, we wanted to make it easy for everyone to try out the new pipelines without going through a whole lot of setup. So we're setting them all up in ready-to-run workspaces on FireCloud, which is a secure, freely-accessible, open-source analysis portal we built on Google Cloud (think Galaxy but more scalable). The pipelines are preconfigured according to our Best Practices, so it'll be just a matter of a few clicks to run any pipeline you like on the preloaded example datasets -- or, with a few more (simple) steps, to run them on your own data. All this without ever touching a command line, unless you're the CLI-over-GUI type, in which case you're welcome to use the FireCloud APIs vis Swagger or the FISS Python bindings to do all this programmatically.
But that's not all -- we're super excited to announce that we're giving out free credits for running the pipelines! Normally you would have to pay Google for the compute and storage costs -- we make the portal and tools available for free, but Google runs the machines, and they charge you for what you use. However, if you apply ASAP, you can get $250 worth of credits for free! That should be more than enough to test out the new pipelines; with that amount of credits you should be able to get real work done toward your research. And you can run any pipelines you want as long as they're written in WDL, so you can run other tools besides GATK.
The FireCloud free credits program starts January 9th, 2018, when GATK4 is released and the new pipelines are made available in FireCloud. We have secured funding to give out $250 worth of credits each to 1,000 people. Credits will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis, so the sooner you sign up, the more likely you are to receive credits.
To take advantage of this unique opportunity, all you need to do is register for an account on the FireCloud portal (which is itself always free and open to all) and sign up for the free credits program. Read on below for details about signing up and which pipelines will be featured.
See https://software.broadinstitute.org/gatk/blog?id=11002 for more details
