Project Objectives for the Period
This second half of the project focused on solidifying the research results created during the first half of the project. The main product that’s been developed in the scope of this project is a software application CloudMan and it’s application in the bioinformatics domain. For those not familiar with the application, CloudMan is a cloud resource manager that provisions cloud computing resources and manages applications atop those resources to deliver functional software services to domain scientists; also see Section 5. Achieving this required creating an application that was robust and readily usable in a variety of scenarios. It also required a significant amount of outreach to inform and train the bioinformatics community about the features of the application. The following is a list of objectives and achievements that helped with those aims:
a. The CloudMan application was extended to incorporate application services for Big Data technologies (e.g., Hadoop). This is inline with the project timeline of expanding the capabilities of the core application with additional services. This has further led to a more generalized software architecture that will make extension of the system with new services quicker.
b. The CloudMan application has been generalized to be compatible with multiple cloud middleware technologies.
c. The process of deploying the CloudMan system (i.e., the virtual machine, hundreds of bioinformatics tools, required database and network services) has been automated (via Ansible: http://www.ansible.com/) and made available under the MIT open source license. In combination with the multi-cloud support, this has paved the way for wider adoption of the developed system as national and research clouds emerge (for example, as part of H2020 ENGAGE project that the host is a part of, it is likely that this system will be deployed on the EGI Federated cloud).
d. Initiated by the fellow, the Host has joined the Galaxy Training Network (GTN) - a global network of people and groups that present Galaxy and Galaxy-based bioinformatics training around the world. Aligned with the project dissemination activities and in cooperation with the GTN, the fellow (with the help from other group members) has developed materials for three different 2-day workshops and delivered them to the researchers the host institution. Nearly 100 researchers have attended the workshops.
e. Additional dissemination activities in form of presentations and short workshops were delivered at various international venues (see below) reaching researcher audience from around the world.
