Welcome to 2025 and yet another newsletter from GenomeDK! You’re busy, so here are the highlights:

Workshop series for getting started with HPC on GenomeDK now open for sign-up.
Announcing the GenomeDK Desktop - a browser-based virtual desktop solution for accessing GenomeDK.
Growing our storage capacity in 2025!

In 2024, we ran 13.5 mio. jobs totalling 62.5 mio. core-hours. We’re also happy to have welcomed 311 new users to GenomeDK!

Announcing the GenomeDK Desktop

We’re excited to announce the GenomeDK Desktop, a browser-based solution that gives you a graphical desktop environment on GenomeDK!

Here’s what it looks like:

The GenomeDK Desktop running in a browser.

The Desktop is available to all users in the “open” zone. You can try it out as of now!

With this solution you can log in with your usual GenomeDK credentials and get a full-blown graphical desktop environment right in your browser.

The desktop environment runs on the frontend, so all of the usual guidelines about not running computations on the frontend still apply. However, the GenomeDK Desktop provides a significantly easier and more responsive way to get a graphical environment on GenomeDK. We have updated our documentation in this area accordingly.

Growing the team

We have doubled the size of the GenomeDK team – which now counts a total of four people!

In the spring we recruited Keld Erik Knudsen as a system administrator. Many of you have already interacted with Keld through the support mail. Keld will help us continue to improve and grow GenomeDK.

We have also recruited Samuele Soraggi to expand and improve our training offerings. Here’s a bit about Samuele:

Samuele has a background as a PhD in applied math and has been doing bioinformatics since moving to AU in 2018. Currently, he is a member of the Danish Health Data Science Sandbox. He develops courses and workshops, often based on GenomeDK, runs the Accessible Bioinformatics Cafe and supports researchers and students who need help with omics and health data analysis.

Some of you already met Samuele at his first GenomeDK workshop on October 10th this year. The workshop was a huge success with more than 50 attendees!

Workshop series for 2025

With Samuele on the team we have now planned GenomeDK’s first ever workshop series! You can read much more about it here.

Please help us circulate the workshop invitations to any relevant departments/groups.

On-request workshops

We also offer on-request workshops, and with Samuele on the team we are now able to take on more of these. The only requirement is that you must be at least five persons attending the workshop. If you’re interested in this offering, get in touch.

(Yes, we even do these workshops outside of Aarhus, but you’ll pay for transport and accommodation).

Upcoming storage expansion

As GenomeDK continues to grow and expand its user base, and more users handle large data sets, we’ll be expanding the capacity of our primary storage system (/faststorage) by approximately 10 PB in the first half of 2025. The expansion will bring us to a total of approximately 33 PB.

Information security highlights

We have launched an information security page that gives a quick overview of the information security on GenomeDK and provides easy access to key documents, such as our ISO 27001-certificate.