Accepted poster & lightning talk at the Galaxy Community Conference 2014
On March 5th, 2014 a team of system administrators and bioinformaticians conducted a hack-a-thon to integrate Galaxy on top of the high-performance computing cluster at Michigan State University complete with single-sign-on and the ability to run jobs as the submitting user. They elicited and received strong community support during the hack-a-thon and engaged Galaxy developers and users through IRC and Twitter. In eight hours this hack-a-thon was able to quickly navigate the various integration hurdles via real time assistance from the Galaxy community. The entire deployment was done as openly as possible with coordination of the various efforts via a separate public chat channel. While there were a couple person-days of prep and follow up, the scheduling of a single day to do the bulk of the installation proved to be critical in getting the job done and was far more effective than the many hours talking about the idea of deploying Galaxy prior. The format allowed for rapid progress as communication time was reduced and developers could modify or add components, receive prompt feedback and continue to build on the growing infrastructure. We advocate a similar recipe of using virtual machines, the Puppet configuration management system, and agile development enabled by the built-in implementations of various components of Galaxy to enable forward progress.
