# Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

[Google Cloud Platform (GCP)](https://cloud.google.com/) is the foundation of the IDC architecture. We rely on GCP to implement the IDC functionality. IDC users can use GCP as the environment to perform the analysis of the data hosted on IDC.

Specific GCP components that we utilize and that can be useful to support cancer imaging research use cases include:

* [Compute Engine](https://cloud.google.com/compute)
* [BigQuery](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery)
* [Cloud Storage](https://cloud.google.com/storage)
* [Healthcare API](https://cloud.google.com/healthcare/docs)

Within CRDC, Cloud Resources are intended to support CRDC users' analysis needs. In the future, we plan to develop use cases and documentation demonstrating best practices for utilizing Cloud Resources for computational tasks. In addition to the GCP components listed above, the following components are not used to support IDC functionality, but can be quite handy:

* [Colab Notebooks](https://colab.research.google.com/)
* [AI Notebooks](https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform-notebooks)
* [DataStudio](http://datastudio.google.com/)
* [Datalab](https://cloud.google.com/datalab/docs)


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