Training Infrastructure Feedback from Charles Girardot

In early September this year, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) organized a week long course entitled Chromatin Signatures During Differentiation: Integrated Omics. This high-quality course was limited to 16 participants and gathered scientists from all around the world.

The Friday was devoted to data analysis using the Galaxy platform (for the genomics part). We (Genome Biology Computational Support team) maintain a local Galaxy platform for everyday analysis and we usually use it to run our data analysis trainings but not this time!

After attending GCC 2019 in Freiburg this year, we wanted to try the new GTN + TIaaS option as it solves (at least on paper) a number of issues compared to using our local Galaxy:

• First, we cannot dedicate and reserve resources on our HPC for a training session. TIaaS just offers this.
• Second, we used to develop our own training material and this takes a lot (I mean a LOT) of time. Creation of the test data, ensuring that the envisioned data analysis runs on this data, that the tools are available and working properly on our instance etc. GTN with TIaaS on usegalaxy.eu solves all that!
• Third, our Galaxy instance is not public. This is not an issue for running the training as we are on the same network but this means that external users (i.e. most of the trainees) won't have access to our Galaxy and their work after the training. Using the TIaaS solution completely solves the issue and lets trainees continue self-learning using all the GTN resources.

So! How did it go?

Setting up the training took less than 4 hours in total. We followed the Formation of the Super-Structures on the Inactive X training from Friederike Dündar, Anika Erxleben, Bérénice Batut, Vivek Bhardwaj, Fidel Ramirez and Leily Rabbani. We were allocated more than enough resources so the training went super smooth and we had a great feedback from the trainees.

Bjoern and the Freiburg team were super helpfull and responsive. The combination of the TIaaS and the GTN is just wonderful, as anticipated. Really enormous congratulations to all of the Freiburg team to put these services up.

Jelle Scholtalbers and Charles Girardot

PS: I almost forgot. It is free...