INTRODUCTION

Creating and managing a bioinformatics system for a lab, institute, or university presents a host of problems. While there are an enormous number of software tools, databases and hardware choices, integrating these into a coherent, reliable and easy-to-use system is difficult to do well. This course will guide participants through the steps needed to install and tailor a system to the needs of the local user community, whether a single research lab or a campus or company-wide system.

TOPICS (tentative):

First steps: Designing a hardware, software, web and database infrastructure for your lab
Make it so: Any user can do anything from anywhere (BIRCH): installing and organizing software; strategies for keeping system administration simple; making programs easy to find and use; care and feeding of your user base
Data pipelines: Everything is a web service (BioMOBY): Using web services; Creating web services; creating and modifying data pipelines in Taverna
Making databases and applications web-accessible (Canadian Bioinformatics Help Desk): Design of application web pages; making databases web-accessible; making software downloadable
Genome annotation pipelines (MAGPIE, BLUEJAY): Implementing MAGPIE; populating the database; gene annotation
High Performance Computing: Computing grids; computing clusters

PREREQUISITES

Previous experience in Unix and Perl, or prior attendance at the Genome Canada Applied Computational Genomics Course.

International attendees are welcome! For more information about this workshop or to download a registration form, please go to

http://www.gcbioinformatics.ca/ACGCWinter06.htm