Galaxy Australia’s uptake reaches a new milestone: 7 million jobs and counting!

Kylie’s class celebrate submitting Galaxy’s seven millionth job

When the seven millionth job was submitted to Galaxy Australia, we were excited to see what area of research had triggered this milestone.  The lucky job was submitted by a student in Dr Kylie Munyard’s undergraduate course ‘Introduction to Bioinformatics’ at Curtin University. 

As Senior Lecturer in Molecular Genetics within the Curtin Medical School, Kylie regularly uses the extensive training materials available in Galaxy Training to teach her graduate researchers and undergraduate students how to use a wide range of data analysis tools: 

“It is intuitive to use, it’s easy because students don’t have to install software, it has lots of really good documentation and visualisation, and all of this helps the students to understand what they are doing and more importantly why they are doing it.”

This university course teaches students how to import their raw sequence read data and move through a standard workflow of assembling genomes, calling variants, creating annotations and studying gene expression using Galaxy Australia. 

Another key feature of Galaxy Australia that makes life easy for computational life science trainers is TIaaS (Training Infrastructure as a Service), or as Kylie describes it: “A little ‘corner’ of Galaxy Australia dedicated for our class use.”

TIaaS provides dedicated compute power, customised dashboards, and tracking of trainee jobs. All Australian trainers are eligible to use TIaaS through a simple application process, which can include setup assistance and backend support during training events. Trainers capture important technical event reports and trainees can access their data after the event for continued learning. 

Rapid uptake of Galaxy Australia by researchers, trainers and trainees demonstrates the platform's versatility across a range of fields. Its popularity amongst bioinformatics teachers is just one of the reasons that it has been only a few months since Galaxy Australia celebrated reaching 6 million jobs! 

Check out the wide range of tutorials available in Galaxy Training, and investigate how TIaaS can support successful training events.