The Queensland branch of Galaxy, a web-based platform for computational biomedical research, has a new user policy to meet increasing demand.
Galaxy-qld’s new policy was implemented on 4 August 2016 to balance the workload so all users get fair access to the processing pipeline.
Users now have a maximum number of concurrent jobs they can run: 16 jobs at a time for registered users, and one job at a time for non-registered users.
Previously, some users submitted a large number of computationally intensive or long running jobs in a very narrow timeframe, taking a significant proportion of the resources available on the server. As a result, other users’ jobs were queued for a long time.
Dr Igor Makunin of RCC, which administers Galaxy-qld, said the new user policy should provide better access to the server for all users. “The server went through a stress test [on 4 August] when two users submitted a couple of hundred jobs within an hour or two. In the past this would cause delays for job execution for all users, but this time most users were not affected, only jobs from the two active users were queued,” he said.
On average, about 50 new users register for Galaxy-qld each month, and the number of submitted jobs are increasing. Galaxy-qld is a public server that anyone can register on.
Please visit the Genomics Virtual Lab blog for more information about Galaxy-qld’s new user policy.
