Building a regional Galaxy Community and Platform
September 12, 2019
Gareth Price(1), Simon Gladman(2), Nuwan Goonasekera(3), Dave Clements(4) and Galaxy Project(5)
- Galaxy Australia Service Manager, Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, Australia
- Galaxy Australia Developer, Melbourne Bioinformatics, Australia
- Galaxy Project Developer, Melbourne Bioinformatics, Sri Lanka
- Galaxy Outreach and Training, Johns Hopkins University, United States
- https://galaxyproject.org, Global
Galaxy (galaxyproject.org) is a widely used and deployed open-source platform that integrates thousands of analysis tools, and supports data integration and analysis, workflow creation, data visualization, and sharing and publishing your analyses and pipelines. Galaxy is also a global community of researchers, programmers, trainers, and users all doing and supporting data intensive research. Galaxy supports regional communities and resources including a large Australian community (usegalaxy.org,au). Galaxy Australia already supports users regionally from: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. Galaxy Australia operates a nationally distributed federation of compute resources, where individual researcher analysis requests are assigned according to a sophisticated rules system optimised for rapid result generation.
This breakout will present a vision for a regional Galaxy community and platform for Asia, Australia, and Oceania that proposes broadening the compute infrastructure underpinning the service to include regional resources. Furthermore the vision will highlight the control afforded to each contributing country in fair-use of contributing resources.
The session will run for one hour with three presentations from:
- Dave Clements – Global Galaxy communities and services, 10 minutes
- Gareth Price – Galaxy Australia as a usegalaxy.* public service, 10 minutes
- Nuwan Goonasekera – Future Galaxy developments for distributed data access, 10 minutes
Followed by 30 minutes of moderated discussion on the benefits of growing a Galaxy service to support a greater number and diversity of researchers regionally. Topics covered will include but are not limited to:
- What could a regional service look like?
- The benefits for contributing institute / organisation
- How does each institute control access to resources
- Can staff time be contributed as well as or instead of computer infrastructure
- What is the sustainability model
- Regional branding on the Galaxy service
The session will conclude with a commitment to grow a community of interested parties and agree on a time frame to resourcing the regional Galaxy service.
Short description of prior experiences in organizing a workshop session
We have organized workshop sessions at ISMB/ECCB, Plant and Animal Genome, SMBE, Galaxy Administrator Conference, Galaxy Community Conference, Australian Society for Microbiology Conference, Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, Australasian Genomic Technologies Association Annual Conference, International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, The Allied Genomics Conference, Association of Biomolecular Research Facilities, Australian Society for Microbiology Conference (2018) plus regularly host Galaxy based workshops at local Australian universities.
Target audience and relevance to INCOB2019
Galaxy Project has over 120 public services globally and in recent years moved to synergise efforts amongst Galaxy instances to maximise the efficient operation of the services. Each Galaxy instance benefits from the community efforts of the other Galaxy services. The usegalaxy.* public services exist in Australia, Europe and the United States. A managed Galaxy service regionally would benefit local researchers. As such, this BoF will be of interest to system administrators, researchers and students with an interest in carrying out bioinformatics analysis, either as a core service for an institute and for individual research questions.
INCOB Commitment
All authors affirm the commitment that their registration, travel and accommodation costs will be covered by funding related to the Galaxy Australia service or Galaxy Project, and that no request for funds from INCOB are being sought. The Breakout has no requirements other than a room, AV equipment and wi-fi access.
