Day 1 : Galaxy Demo /Training Day
This day was dedicated to Galaxy beginners who want and have been commited a task to develop a Galaxy instance in their institutions. The talks covered very basic issues both for Galaxy admins and users. Though basic, it was very useful in presenting the most recent features in Galaxy which are not included in the Lifeportal instance.
Day 2 : 2nd Swiss Galaxy Workshop
Nikolay Vazov were invited to teach the topic :
Authentication in Galaxy : let's use what is out there - National Identity Providers. Authentication which is currently used in Lifeportal and some other Galaxy instances at UiO is unique in that it is the only available instance so far using the technology Service Provider - Identity Provider in authentication. The talk was met with a lot of interest and we reached an agreement with Dan Baker, a developer from the core Galaxy team in the US, that they will try to integrate our implementation in the future Galaxy releases.
The group of participants from Norway was the largest : 6 out of about 30. Jeevan Karloss from CIGENE, Norwegian University of Life Sciences presented a general overview of Elixir activities in the talk : "Elixir Norway and Galaxy"
The other talks were oriented towards the use of NGS tools and some experience from the FMI institue in Basel and Strassbourg.
Day 3 : 1st German Galaxy Developer workshop
The German workshop contained a couple of very interesting talks. Nicola Soranzo (CRS4) presented the APIs and the possibility to communicate with Galaxy from a terminal and at the same time to profit the Galaxy GUI to display the results. Sebastian Schaaf presented a very interesting experience in Galaxy deployment in Munich University hospital dealing with issues close those USIT has in implementing TSD. We stay in close touch with most of the participants who express deep interest in our GOLD implementation.
Main observations:
The Galaxy community grows exponentially as well as the needs for computing resources. The US Galaxy main site is now running the jobs in TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center). It will definitely move towards clusters more and more. Cloud implementations were also demponstrated for users with more moderate needs. Norway and USIT in particular are among the best positioned Galaxy sites in the world with extremely useful customizations.
The next Swiss/German workshop will take place in the same towns in 2 years. the exact dates are to be confirmed.