Last month, after meeting with all the awesome folks at the Organization of Biological Field Stations Meeting in Minnesota (an amazingly interesting and fun meeting – see here for details on that trip!), NCGAS become XSEDE Domain Champions for Field Stations.  It became apparent quickly that the community has different needs than our typical genomics clientele, facing issues with internet stability in remote areas, environmental sensor management, workshop support, data collection hosting, and large database access.  

Our first steps in assisting with these issues was to sponsor workshops with Jetstream VMs.  EDI was running a workshop on the workflow from environmental data through R and OpenRefine to get it formatted properly in Ecological Metadata Language for upload into a data repository for distribution and wider scale user.  We provided preconfigured VMs serving individual instances of RStudio and OpenRefine, allowing for easily accessible uniform set ups.  Additionally, this VM is public, and able to be used by anyone with an xsede allocation after the workshop.

However, access to this tool (and others) requires the use of the XSEDE Jetstream Cloud. NCGAS previously only had allocation use for genomics users as part of our original start up XSEDE allocation.  As of this week, that has changed.

NCGAS now has resource allocation specifically for field station use!

What does this entail?

We have resources available for field station personnel and researchers to use to learn and use the cloud system (Jetstream), store large data while working on analysis (Wrangler), and computation on a large cluster (Wrangler Compute).  Gaining access to these resources does not require an individual application for a start up, so you can experiment with the resources to see if they are a good fit without virtually any start up effort.  After deciding you love the resources, we can help you get started on your own allocation!

How do you get access?

Go here and follow the steps.  This link will walk you through getting an XSEDE username and sending us the important information for adding you to our allocation.  Then an NCGAS staff member will respond within 24-48 hours!

After that, you can explore our increasing list of guides on getting started on resources:

Getting Started on Jetstream
Getting Started on Globus
Easy to Use Genome Browsers* (Coming soon – after PAG 2018!)