UseGalaxy.eu (https://usegalay.eu) is the main European Galaxy public instance, providing more than 2000 tools belonging to different bioinformatics research fields. Tens of smaller scale Galaxy instances are also available across Europe, while ELIXIR-IT is launching its first own Galaxy on-demand cloud service at the ReCaS Cloud and GARR Cloud facilities. It is therefore critical for ELIXIR Nodes to quickly build expertise in Galaxy servers administration and to continue developing the technological infrastructure needed to sustain the European Galaxy network.
The ELIXIR-IT "Laniakea@GARRCloud" program, currently ongoing, aims to deploy a Laniakea Galaxy on-demand service also at GARR Cloud, following the one already available at ReCaS Cloud, and the concurrent installation of a Pulsar endpoint to allow the execution of UseGalaxy.eu jobs on GARR Cloud, together with the deployment of a mirror (stratum 1) of the Galaxy CVMFS System server. Both UseGalaxy.eu and Pulsar network development and maintenance are driven by the Freiburg Galaxy Team (ELIXIR-DE).
This Staff Exchange's purpose is to allow "Laniakea@GARRCloud" developer and Laniakea lead developer to travel to Freiburg, where the Galaxy Europe Freiburg Team (ELIXIR-DE) is based, for a couple of months in order to quickly build expertise and receive advanced training on Pulsar, CVMFS and their deployment on Cloud infrastructures.
We expect that this Staff Exchange will foster a smoother and faster integration of ELIXIR-IT activities within the ELIXIR Galaxy community, establishing more direct links between the Italian and the German ELIXIR Nodes and allowing the creation of a robust and lasting collaboration between the two Nodes on Galaxy-related topics.
Blog post decribing the project: https://usegalaxy-eu.github.io/posts/2022/02/22/ELIXIR-staff-exchange/