Galaxy Australia – a strengthened national life science service that engages globally

Dr Gareth Price1, Mr Simon Gladman2, Dr Nigel Ward3, Dr Steven Manos3, Dr Rhys Francis3, Associate Professor Andrew Lonie3

1QCIF Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics, St Lucia, Australia
2Melbourne Bioinformatics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
3Australian BioCommons, Parkville, Australia

Background: Galaxy Australia (GA) – https://usegalaxy.org.au – is a highly effective digital analysis service for the life sciences. User numbers have doubled annually, now at ~15,000 registered users with ~2,300 active in the last 3 months, ~1,500 tools and reference data offerings steadily increasing. This rapid growth outgrew initial infrastructure; therefore in the last year GA relocated to Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, providing an interim highly effective home. Longer term, significant investment by the Australian BioCommons, AARNet, ARDC, NCI, Pawsey, the University of Melbourne (UoM), QCIF and the Queensland Government, has resulted in the architecting of a sustainable highly scalable solution at AARNet.

Actions: GA has designed and built a new home at AARNet. Additionally, GA now includes large compute resources at NCI and Pawsey, and dedicated 4Tb high memory machines for complex jobs at UoM and QCIF. Adding access to GPU and commercial cloud resources is enabling completely new analytical options and accommodating funded workload acceleration when needed.

Results: The purpose built GA head node, the continual code base development, the new hardware – local, national and commercial – have all combined to allow GA to support access to best practice pipelines and tools in genomics, proteomics and metabolomics.

Conclusion: GA is now critical digital research infrastructure for the Australian life sciences community and more broadly, the global Galaxy ecosystem; therefore GA is planning on hosting both regional and global conferences to bring Galaxy practitioners from all around the globe to learn from our journey and inform the path forward.


Biography:

Dr Gareth Price is Head of Computational Biology at QCIF Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics. In this role Gareth manages the diverse spectrum of researcher lead questions involving genomic data, provides training in genomic data analysis, as well as leading Galaxy Australia (https://usegalaxy.org.au) as Service Manager.

Date

Oct 13 2021
Expired!

Time

2:00 pm - 2:20 pm

Local Time

  • Timezone: America/New_York
  • Date: Oct 12 2021
  • Time: 11:00 pm - 11:20 pm