Pawsey boosts Galaxy Australia’s capabilities with COVID-19 grant

Australian researchers can now rapidly analyse their SARS-CoV-2 data using published tools and workflows by using a new dedicated Galaxy COVID-19 compute node hosted at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. The ability of Galaxy Australia and Pawsey to jointly deliver this enabling data analytics platform has been made possible as part of the COVID-19 Accelerated Access Initiative in which Australia’s national HPC facilities responded quickly to the pandemic with streamlined, prioritised and expedited access to computation and data resources. NCI Australia and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre have now announced that the Galaxy COVID-19 compute node would be hosted on Pawsey’s newly deployed Nimbus Cloud, guaranteeing tailored resources for urgent public health research. 

The new resource will deliver the benefits that were highlighted in the recent joint publication written by the international Galaxy team from Australia, Germany, Belgium and the USA who demonstrated how the Galaxy platform can facilitate the exchange of data and reproducible workflows between authorities, institutes and laboratories, ensuring that progress is no longer limited by access to samples and data. The compute allocation at Pawsey has been set up to exclusively underpin the use of the COVID-19 related tools and workflows outlined in that publication, on Galaxy Australia.

A national call out for Australian researchers tackling the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in seven projects receiving access to computation and expertise. Read the Leaders in Australian Computing Research Begin Battle with COVID-19 media release here.