Applied Cyber Infrastructure Class at U. Arizona

The Applied Cyber Infrastructure Concepts course at the University of Arizona makes use of the Cooperative Computing Tools to teach principles of large scale distributed computing. The project-based course introduced fundamental concepts and tools for analyzing large datasets on national computing resources and commercial cloud providers. For the final project, students developed an appliance for annotating multiple rice genomes using MAKER software, distributed across Amazon and FutureGrid resources via the Work Queue framework. They also developed a web application to visualize the performance and utilization of each cloud appliance in real-time, overall progress of the rice annotation process, and integrated the final results into a genome browser. - Nirav Merchant and Eric Lyons, University of Arizona