As a key web-based platform for bioinformatics analysis in Australia, Galaxy Australia is focused on maintaining a robust front-end web presence with the scalable capacity and high performance expected by researchers.

A continuous improvement approach is in place to ensure the needs of a growing cohort of researchers registering for the service are met.

The latest improvement to Galaxy Australia is the recent move of the head node and associated services to Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet). This move provides a long-term high-performing and reliable hosting environment for Galaxy Australia infrastructure. Importantly, the move will allow capacity to be increased on demand to support more users at the same time, and overall. The move also frees up Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre (Pawsey) to focus on providing back-end compute services to power Galaxy Australia’s more than 1,800 installed tools, covering genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, statistics and data visualisations.

AARNet is a national resource owned by Australian universities and national science agency CSIRO and has provided ultra-high-speed telecommunications and collaboration services specifically for research and education for more than three decades. A trusted sector partner renowned for an exceptionally high level of service delivery, AARNet will provide Galaxy Australia with 24/7 operational monitoring and response services, seamless network configuration and failover management, and the hardware capacity to support user and data growth projections.

With the AARNet team taking care of all the front-end physical infrastructure operations, the Galaxy Australia team can focus on using computational resources at Pawsey, University of Melbourne, QCIF, and Azure to meet the growing needs of the more than 19,500 registered users of the service.

Prior to the deployment to AARNet, an integrated team working across AARNet, Pawsey, Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) and Melbourne Bioinformatics undertook many months of exhaustive preparation and testing. This all paid off, with little service downtime experienced during the deployment and Galaxy Australia jobs now running successfully from AARNet.

Chris Hancock, AARNet CEO said, “We are delighted to be providing a high-performing long-term hosting solution that will support the growth and development of Galaxy Australia and help life sciences researchers with their important work. This is a great example of how AARNet works closely with sector partners to solve complex technical problems with infrastructure and make it easier for researchers to analyse data and collaborate.”

AARNet joins Galaxy Australia, QCIF, Melbourne Bioinformatics, University of Melbourne and Australian BioCommons in the collective responsibility for the management of the Galaxy Australia platform.

Gareth Price, Science lead on the Galaxy Australia team said of the move, “The move to AARNet means our existing and new users will experience fast response times across all aspects of their Galaxy experience - homepage loading, history refreshes, and workflow execution to name a few. On top of the performance improvements, we add new tools weekly, have annotated tools to aid in discovery, and updated our support options. If it's been a while since you last visited Galaxy Australia I recommend coming back for a visit.”

Galaxy Australia is an Australian BioCommons service, jointly supported by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) through the Australian Research Data Commons and Bioplatforms Australia; the Queensland Government’s Research Infrastructure Co-investment Fund; and The University of Melbourne.

Managed by QCIF, Melbourne Bioinformatics and AARNet, Galaxy Australia is underpinned by computational resources provided by AARNet, the ARDC, The University of Melbourne, The University of Queensland, QCIF, National Computational Infrastructure, and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.

The BioCommons BYOD [Bring Your Own Data] Expansion Project received investment (doi.org/10.47486/PL105) from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The ARDC is funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.

This article was co published with Australian BioCommons