galaxy / galaxy-central
Main development repository for Galaxy. Active development happens here, and this repository is thus intended for those working on Galaxy development. See http://bitbucket.org/galaxy/galaxy-dist/ for a more stable repository intended for end-users.
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/galaxy/galaxy-central/
Galaxy on the cloud
With sporadic availability of data, individuals and labs may have a need to, over a period of time, process greatly variable amounts of data. Such variability in data volume imposes variable requirements on availability of compute resources used to process given data. Rather than having to purchase and maintain desired compute resources or having to wait a long time for data processing jobs to complete, the Galaxy Team has enabled Galaxy to be instantiated on cloud computing infrastructures, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Eucalyptus. An instance of Galaxy on the cloud behaves just like a local instance of Galaxy except that it offers the benefits of cloud computing resource availability and pay-as-you-go resource ownership model. Having simple access to Galaxy on the cloud enables as many instances of Galaxy to be acquired and started as is needed to process given data. Once the need subsides, those instances can be released as simply as they were acquired. With such paradigm, one pays only for the resources they need and use while all the other concerns and costs are eliminated.
Instantiating Galaxy instance
For the purposes of executing Galaxy on the cloud, we have packaged Galaxy and Galaxy-required tools as a virtual machine (VM) image that resides with Amazon (referred to as an AMI - Amazon Machine Image). This VM acts as a complete unit that can be easily instantiated offering the same functionality as any other instance of Galaxy. Currently, there are two ways to instantiate and manage an instance of Galaxy on the cloud:
Galaxy AMI's
32-bit AMI to be used with m1.small and c1.medium Amazon EC2 instance types:
- AMI: ami-9724c7fe
- Manifest: galaxy-ami-32/galaxy_32.img.manifest.xml
64-bit AMI to be used with all other Amazon EC2 instance types:
- AMI: ami-1430d27d
- Manifest: galaxy-ami-64bit/galaxy64.img.manifest.xml
Notes
Amazon EC2 service is a pay-as-you-go service where all that is need to use it is a valid credit card. Rates for Amazon EC2 can be found here.
Although it is possible to utilize Eucalyptus-based cloud infrastructures through the Galaxy web interface,currently there is no Galaxy-specific pre-configured VM available for Eucalyptus yet. It should be possible to use Amazon's AMI inside Eucalyptus (but we have not gotten to trying it out yet).
Instantiating Galaxy on the cloud is a brand new feature being developed by the Galaxy team and there are some restrictions and limitations as to this feature's current usability. The most obvious limitation is that although as many instances of Galaxy can be started on the cloud, these instances are independent of each other. In other words, it is currently not possible to create a cluster of resources on the cloud so that computational jobs submitted to a single instance of Galaxy automatically get distributed across the acquired resource pool to speed up the execution.