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2010 Annual General Meeting – Technical Management Project Committee Report
(November 2009 – June 2010)
The TMPC is responsible for developing and maintaining a number of vital IT infrastructure components, namely: i)The embnet.org web server, ii)The embnet.org mailing lists, iii)The embnet.org Domain Name Servers (DNS).During the last year, the TMPC has performed the following activities:
César is doing a monthly backup of the Drupal Database and a “sync” of the Drupal installation and files used within Drupal (excluding e-learning files). This backup is performed by one of his servers in Mexico. DVD-backups are also done locally at the webserver. Jerker Nyberg at BMC’s computing department has written a script that makes backups to the 1TB external disk that he installed. Steps to establish a mirror site of the MACOSX server in Pakistan have been taken by Nazim. However, recent assessments of MacOS X as a platform with problems compiling properly various open source packages, necessitates a thorough discussion about the best way to establish the planned mirror site.
The eLearning site has been upgraded by (TMPC plus Jose R. Valverde) to the latest version, which now supports CAPTCHAs to avoid flooding by spammers. Measures have been taken to decrease the risk of security breaches (strengthened and revised by George Magklaras and BMC IT). New modules to support Jmol and automatic certificate generation have been added as well.
Members of the TMPC are involved in planning and establishing bioinformatics services locally for the management and analysis of the vast quantities of data coming from the new generation of sequencing instruments (‘Next Gen’ data).
Members of the TMPC were represented on the organizing committee of a workshop in Rome November 18-20, on next generation sequencing related bioinformatics (www.nextgenerationsequencing.org). The secretary of the TMPC (George Magklaras) delivered a talk, outlining the IT/computational challenges of next generation sequencing projects.
In March 2010, the TMPC (George Magklaras) was involved in activities to help the Mexican EMBnet node with the process of formatting EMBOSS datasets. Consultation is also under way to upgrade their server infrastructure in order to be able to install MRS 4. As a result of this activity. the TMPC will soon release a set of scripts as guidance to format EMBOSS datasets. Details of this project will be released before the end of Fall 2010.
In December 2010, the TMPC (Harald Dahle, George Magklaras) was invloved in activities to help the Greek EMBnet node with the process of making a web enabling Protein-to-Protein-Interaction application (http://superclusteroid.uio.no). The help involved the TMPC in arranging a domain name and a web server instance for them to run their application, as well as integrating their application to a number of standard utilities.