After more than 15 years of development and use, the Galaxy analysis platform has reached hundreds of thousands of users that have executed millions of jobs and completed countless analyses of Next Generation Sequencing data. This speaks to the robustness as well as popularity of the software that has grown from an ambitious academic project into a world-wide community of users, developers, and trainers. The reach of Galaxy is second to none with users adopting it from every corner of the world. For example, a week-long world-wide training event, the Galaxy Smörgåsbord, took place in February 2021 that attracted over 1,200 participants! This is an absolutely stunning number.

As a natural consequence of such rapid adoption and community growth, the needs of users are also growing. The world-wide network of public servers processes upward of a million user jobs each month and offers remarkable processing capacity. However, the growth in the number of users and diversity of their processing requirements calls for an additional solution that provides enhanced guarantees.

Galaxy Pro Researcher

To address some of these needs, we are happy to announce beta availability of Galaxy Pro Researcher - a first ever Galaxy subscription service. Researcher is a managed Galaxy service that offers no usage quotas, no queue wait times for jobs, access to exotic hardware (such as high-memory or CPU machines), Service Level Agreements, and enhanced service security. Anyone can sign up and start using Galaxy within minutes.

Subscription plans

Researcher offers a number of subscription plans to match the needs for a variety of analyses. All the plans have a fixed cost so you know exactly how much your analyses will cost, eliminating the uncertainty of using cloud resources and paying per use. The subscriptions also are significantly cheaper than if you ran your own server in the cloud, but we'll have more on that in a separate post.

Why Researcher

Overall, Researcher reduces the need to install and maintain a local instance of Galaxy as it offers dynamically scalable resource capacity that will match the demand and yield a predictable runtime for your jobs. All the same features of Galaxy are available allowing you to store, analyze, and collaboratively interpret the data at scale. The Service Level Agreement offers service guarantees regarding service availability, privacy, and data security offering a peace of mind about using Galaxy.

Availability

We are thrilled to make this service available and see what you will be able to do with Galaxy going forward. To make sure we have any lingering kinks worked out, it'll be an invite-only beta for a while. Let us know if you'd like access and we'll send you an invite! (The service is also free during the beta period with a sweet, lifelong discount following.)