Training Infrastructure as a service (TIaaS) Feedback from Dr. Janne M. Toivonen

In the last 5 years, we have run a 3-hour RNA-Seq analysis workshop in Galaxy as a part of Master’s degree in the University of Zaragoza, Spain. While the training has been fruitful, we have suffered from occasional delays due to waiting periods during the past years. This year we used usegalaxy.eu and tried the Training Infrastructure as a service (TIaaS) to alleviate the above-mentioned problem.

The training session was significantly faster although some variation in the processing time was still observed between the trainees. The training included import of RNA-Seq datasets (6 files from SRA), reference genome and annotation file followed by Quality Control, Mapping and Counting Reads per Gene. First, these steps were completed with one sample and the rest of the samples were processed using the saved workflow. Finally, we carried out Differential Expression Analysis using the counts files. To make sure that we have sufficient time to complete the task the previously produced counts files were used in this last step, as we were expecting that utilizing the workflow for several samples could take a long time. However, the processing time was surprisingly fast and, if the TIaaS is still available in future, we think it is reasonable to expect that, in the future, we complete the whole session without previously prepared files.

The provided queue status page to see which jobs are being run by people in training is very good and works perfectly. This is a good way of facilitating the training, thank you!