Popularity of Galaxy Australia prompts move of core services to AARNet

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. 

Galaxy Australia has moved its head node and associated services to Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet) to allow increased on-demand support for more users. This move provides a long-term, high-performing and reliable hosting environment for Galaxy Australia infrastructure. Importantly, the move also enables the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre (Pawsey), a tier one national infrastructure available to all researchers in Australia, 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. 

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.

Chris Hancock, AARNet CEO

AARNet joins QCIF and Melbourne Bioinformatics in the collective responsibility for the management of the Australia BioCommons’ Galaxy Australia service. 

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.

Gareth Price, Galaxy Australia’s Science Lead

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 announcement was co-published with AARNet.