FAQs

How can I leave you feedback?

User feedback in one of the most important ways for us to improve user satisfaction and ensure our offering is fit for purpose. Please use the Contact us to give us feedback. .

What options do I have when I want to use the PhenoMeNal services?

Depending on you preference you can choose a public or a private (local) installation of the PhenoMeNal services. Currently we support both Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services to deploy to. Please visit the portal to deploy to one of the public providers. Local installation can be done to OpenStack or for testing purposes you can use a MiniKube installation. More about local installation can be found on our developers wiki.

How can I run my own tools on the PhenoMeNal infrastructure?

There are two ways to do that. You can either follow the instructions on our wiki on how to make your software available through PhenoMeNal or do a manual deployment of the infrastructure and add the tools directly. More information on how to manually deploy PhenoMeNal can be found also on our wiki at: QuickStart Installation for Local PhenoMeNal Workflow. This also explains the preferred way to test your software locally before making it available through PhenoMeNal.

What does it cost?

All software is available free of charge on GitHub. Depending on how and where you deploy our services you may be required to pay for hosting and/or data storage/transfer. As soon as our first release is made public we will provide and example (best effort) overview of the cost for running the PhenoMeNal services on Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services.

What is the difference between the public instance CRE and the CRE on the phenomenal cloud

The public instance is a shared space where you are running on the same Galaxy instance as the other users. Your user space is your own of course, but you are sharing the computational resources where this is running. This might mean that, for instance, if the public instance is under high load, your jobs will take longer. If other users are using large amounts of the hard disk space that we provide there, it might mean that you don’t have enough space. We don’t guarantee either the security or persistence of your data there, the point of the public instance is merely for users to try the infrastructure freely before deciding to commit to their own deployment. While we do every effort to keep the public instance stable, as it sometimes has many users, it can suffer from downtimes. We currently don’t impose user quotas or amount of time that the data can live on there, but this might change of course as well in the future if we see the need.

In contrast, a deployment on a cloud provider is your own, and you don’t compete for resources with other users. To get an idea, running a PhenoMeNal deployment on Amazon for 24 hours costs in the region of USD 20 or so. It is less likely to have downtimes as well, provided that the load is adequate.