Training Infrastructure as a Service
Abstract
Background
Hands-on training, whether it is in Bioinformatics or other scientific domains, requires significant resources and knowledge to setup and run. Trainers must have access to infrastructure that can support the sudden spike in usage, with classes of 30 or more trainees simultaneously running resource intensive tools. For efficient classes, the jobs must run quickly, without queuing delays, lest they disrupt the timetable set out for the class. Often times this is achieved via running on a private server where there is no contention for the queue, and therefore no or minimal waiting time. However, this requires the teacher or trainer to have the technical knowledge to manage compute infrastructure, in addition to their didactic responsibilities. This presents significant burdens to potential training events, in terms of infrastructure cost, person-hours of preparation, technical knowledge, and available staff to manage such events.
Findings
Galaxy Europe has developed Training Infrastructure as a Service (TIaaS) which we provide to the scientific commnuity as a service built on top of the Galaxy Platform. Training event organisers request a training and Galaxy administrators can allocate private queues specifically for the training. Trainees are transparently placed in a private queue where their jobs run without delay. Trainers access the dashboard of the TIaaS Service and can remotely follow the progress of their trainees without in-person interactions.
Conclusions
TIaaS on Galaxy Europe provides reusable and fast infrastructure for Galaxy training. The instructor dashboard provides visibility into class progress, making in-person trainings more efficient and remote training possible. In the past 24 months, > 110 trainings with over 3000 trainees have used this infrastructure for training, across scientific domains, all enjoying the accessibility and reproducibility of Galaxy for training the next generation of bioinformaticians. TIaaS itself is an extension to Galaxy which can be deployed by any Galaxy administrator to provide similar benefits for their users.<ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://galaxyproject.eu/tiaas">https://galaxyproject.eu/tiaas</ext-link>
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