The goal of this Staff Exchange Project between ELIXIR Nodes in Slovenia and Spain was exchange of knowledge and best practices in the development of an auto-scalling cloud computing platform and the deployment of a virtual controlled environment for training purposes.
The project consisted of a two short visits of members of ELIXIR Spain to Slovenia (University of Ljubljana) and one visit of ELIXIR Slovenia members to ELXIR Spain (University of Malaga). In addition, there was one workshop "Parallel computing in bioinformatics research" organised as part of the PRACEDays 18 (The European HPC Summit held in Ljubljana, Slovenia).
Outcomes
The Staff Exchange project developed a virtual playground/trainground service for easy access for trainees to educational resources (multimedia, exercises, feedback surveys etc.) and the necessary technical tools, without them having to install any tools or software locally.
The services has been implemented on the ELIXIR Slovenia eLearning Platform. As a proof-of-concept, two new HPC courses were established on the platform with materials provided by ELIXIR Spain.
Furthermore, as a result of the project, ELIXIR Spain and ELIXIR Slovenia established a longer-term collaboration with several new collaborative projects, particularly in personalised medicine, machine learning and interactive online courses hosted on the ELIXIR Slovenia eLearning Platform.