Dr Cameron Hyde1, Ms Grace Hall2, Mr Simon Gladman2, Ms Catherine Bromhead2, Ms Madeline Bassetti1, Dr Gareth Price1, Dr Nigel Ward3
1Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, Brisbane, Australia, 2Melbourne Bioinformatics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, 3Australian BioCommons,
Situation: Galaxy Australia, the flagship service of the Australian BioCommons, has for over 4 years enabled thousands of Australian researchers to easily access Australia’s distributed computing infrastructure, to perform complex and reproducible analyses. AlphaFold 2.0 has been publicly released in the last 6 months and triggered global excitement in the field of proteomics and more broadly in comparative biology. AlphaFold 2.0 is a neural network trained for the purpose of rapid and highly accurate 3D protein modelling. However, early access to this resource was far from ideal; Google Colab allowed free, online access but with limited throughput (one analysis at a time). Institutional GPU clusters provided some researchers access, but these resources are scarce across Australian Tier 1 and 2 computing infrastructures.
Task: In a world first, the BioCommons chose to make AlphaFold available through Galaxy Australia’s web interface.
Action: To enable this, Galaxy Australia worked with Pawsey, Galaxy Europe and Microsoft’s Azure cloud to deploy a persistent Galaxy node on Azure dedicated to AlphaFold processing. A staged access rollout was performed to help understand the usage of commercial cloud, followed by user experience consultation with early adopters.
Result: Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, led to an additional secured grant and ultimately demonstrated that Galaxy Australia is the foremost service for delivering world class analytics to Australian researchers. This presentation will showcase the global leading efforts of Galaxy Australia to link Galaxy to an on-demand GPU cluster, enabling cutting-edge research supported by real-life user testimonials.
Biography:
Cameron is a bioinformatician and software engineer for Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, where he spends most of his time developing the Galaxy Australia platform.