Galaxy - a collaborative tool for High Performance Computing

TrackTrack 3 (Auditorium 3)
DescriptionOne of the prioritized aspects of the High-Performance Computing (HPC) services at University of Oslo, is to make the use of complex HPC resources accessible to end-users who do not have extensive HPC experience. Galaxy - an open, web-based platform for data intensive research - brings a solution to this problem. It is an example of a collaborative tool that combines different technologies, and allows administrators and end-users with different levels of IT expertise to work together.
 
Galaxy allows non-expert users to execute HPC tasks by manipulating a Web interface responsible for handling of complex computational tasks. This feature of Galaxy makes it open, not only to researchers who traditionally possess extensive IT knowledge, but also to researchers from domains with recently emerging needs for computational resources (e.g. statistics in medical research or linguistics).
 
The flexibility of Galaxy makes the collaboration between the end-users and administrators easier - installation, tuning and maintenance of resource access through a web-tool middleware layer is much simpler than administration of a low-level terminal-based system with direct user access.
 
However, the most important "collaborative" feature of the Galaxy platform is that it allows the users to share workflows and intermediate/final results of the data processing at any stage of the computation. This sharing procedure is quick and entirely user-driven.
 
Due to the web interface, Galaxy can easily become a front-end to large computational resource(s), like storage, grids, clouds, Nordic sharing, and services with sensitive research data.
 
In this talk we will present our work on web-portals as an interface to advanced resources. We will explain how we are using the portable Galaxy framework to achieve our goals and why it was chosen, along with some of the challenges and future plans.

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