PhenomenalUseCase

PhenoMeNalGateway Use Case

PhenoMeNalGateway An easy to use, cloud based scalable software infrastructure for metabolomic research. It is a science gateway that provides web-based interfaces to expose powerful tools for running, developing, and sharing metabolomic workflows.

Software Architecture

The PhenoMeNal architecture and operation is well described on it's overview page.

The key characteristics of the architecture can be understood by focusing on the compute abstraction provided by the KubeNow platform.

The automatic Phenomenal Cloud Research Environment (CRE) deploy consists of four nodes. A master (which doubles as the edge node, as in most simple clusters), two compute nodes, and one gluster storage node. All parts of phenomenal are run as containers in the resulting Kubernetes cluster (e.g. galaxy web server and metabolomics tools). The service profile for phenomenal is four URLs: galaxy, jupyter, luigi, and the Kubernetes master. These are can be mapped to the edge IPs via dynamic dns/round-robin by Cloudflare.

The cloud layer (AWS, Google, OpenStack or local VMs) is about providing the virtual hosts to run a basic install of KubeNow. The compute fabric and reliability can be scaled via Kubernetes by adding more function specific nodes. This is Kubernetes' strength. It provides resilience.