GMOD in the Cloud

Making use of virtualization--hosting data and/or applications on existing networked computer systems--to give users access to preconfigured, extensible servers is an alternative to building and maintaining large computing infrastructure in-house. GMOD in the Cloud is a virtual server, available through the Amazon compute cloud, equipped with a suite of preconfigured GMOD components and GMOD in a Box is an identical implementation in a VirtualBox virtual machine. Both include a Chado database, GBrowse2, JBrowse, Tripal, and WebApollo. Users can clone the GMOD Amazon Machine Image (AMI) or download the VirtualBox implementation from the GMOD ftp site, and either way create their own server for storing data and making it available to the public or a select group of users. Potential applications of the GMOD images range from short term usage, such as during annotation jamborees, to the long term provision of access to genome data and applications to the community.