2011 GMOD Spring Training

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GMOD Americas 2011}}
2011 GMOD Spring Training

March 8-12, 2011
NESCent
Durham, North Carolina, United States

Part of GMOD Americas 2011

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The 2011 GMOD Spring Training will be held May 8-12 at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, North Carolina, as part of GMOD Americas 2011. Like previous GMOD Schools, this one will focus on installing, configuring and integrating popular GMOD Components. Sessions will be taught by GMOD Component developers and GMOD staff. There is space for 25 participants and admission is competitive.

Applications

Admission to the course is competitive and is based on the strength of the application (especially the statement of interest). In 2010 there were over 60 applicants for 25 slots.

We will start accepting applications in early December. (Watch this space for a link.) Applications will be reviewed over the holiday break and applicants will be notified of their status in January.

Registration fees have not been definitively set, but are likely to fall in the $225-$295 range for the course.

Schedule

The tentative daily start and end times, and topics are below.

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Date Time Event
March 4 7pm-9pm Introduction to GMOD
March 5-6 9am-5pm March 2011 GMOD Community Meeting
March 7 8:30am-5pm Satellite Meetings
Tuesday
March 8
8:30am-5:30pm
7pm-9pm
2011 GMOD Spring Training
A week long hands-on course on GMOD Component installation, configuration, and usage. The course will cover these components in detail:

ApolloMAKERGBrowseChadoInterMineJBrowseGBrowse_synTripalGFF3Galaxy

Wednesday
March 9
8:30am-5:30pm
7pm-9pm
Thursday
March 10
8:30am-5:30pm
7pm-9pm
Friday
March 11
8:30am-5:30pm
7pm-9pm
Saturday
March 12
8:30am-5:30pm
7pm-9pm

This schedule will become more definitive in the next few weeks.

Most sessions will last half a day. We are going to try something new this year. Each night the instructors for that day's topics will be available to answer questions and help participants use the tools with their data.

Instructors

Sessions will be taught by experienced component developers and GMOD project staff, including:

Instructor GMOD Affiliation Affiliation
Scott Cain GMOD Project Coordinator; Chado, GBrowse Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Dave Clements GMOD Help Desk National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)
Stephen Ficklin Tripal Washington State University
Alex Kalderimis InterMine FlyMine
Barry Moore MAKER University of Utah
Ed Lee Apollo Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-source Projects (BBOP)
Sheldon McKay GBrowse_syn, GBrowse iPlant Collaborative
Mitch Skinner JBrowse University of California, Berkeley

Prerequisites

The course requires a minimal level of Linux systems administration knowledge (see Computing Requirements). By "a minimal level of Linux systems administration knowledge" we mean that participants should be

  1. Comfortable with the Linux command line interface, and
  2. Comfortable installing packages under Linux.

A good benchmark for this level of knowledge is that you should be able to get a basic GBrowse installation (that is, GBrowse without MySQL) up and running with the example GBrowse data. This also requires installing Apache, and BioPerl and all its dependencies.

System Requirements

VMware

Participants are required to bring their own laptops, already capable of running a virtual system (e.g. VMware) image.

The course starts with getting a virtual system image (built specifically for the course) up and running on your machine. We then build upon that image in each succeeding session. We will probably use VMware for the course:

VMware on Windows and Linux

Windows http://www.microsoft.com/}} Linux}} A free VMware player is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems from VMware. You will need to register to download it. There are multiple versions. Be sure to download a version that can run on your laptop.


VMware on Mac OS X

Apple http://www.apple.com/macosx/}} Participants can also bring newer Macs with Intel processors. The Intel processor is a requirement for all the packages discussed below. There is no free VMware player that runs directly under Mac OS X. However, there are several other options, all of which require an Intel Mac:
VMware Fusion
Fusion http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/}}  VMware Fusion ($80/corporate, $40/Academic) allows you to run VMware images (as well as Windows and Linux) under Mac OS. We recommend this option for Mac users. There is a fully functional, 30 day free trial version of VMware Fusion available for download.
VirtualBox
VirtualBox-logo.png VirtualBox is free and open source, and runs on Intel Macs (and Windows, Linux and Solaris too). It claims to be capable of running VMware images, but we have not tested this with our images.

Costs

There will be a registration fee for the course to pay instructor costs and incidentals. We will post that information here as soon as we have it.

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is hosting this course and all other GMOD Americas 2011 events. NESCent is interested in outreach to groups who are underrepresented in evolutionary biology and improving evolution education, and offers resources for scientists, educators, and the general public that meet these goals. NESCent|140|http://nescent.org}}

Travel, Lodging and Meals

See the GMOD Americas 2011 page for details.

Feedback

GMOD solicits input at the end of every event. We'll post the feedback for this course short after it finishes.

In the meantime:

{{{1}}}
“I would whole-heartedly recommend this course to others! It was extremely informative.”
“Overall it was exceptional.”
“Great job!”
“Overall this course was essential for me to be able to go forward and implement the GMOD tools.”
“Instructors and participants were all bright, articulate, and interesting. The days were long but the pace was reasonable. Overall, this was one of the best ongoing education experiences I have ever had.”
“The speakers were really good.”
  
“It was an amazing course.”
“The amount of information presented was terrific and the online course material was very well done. I learned a lot!”
“It was definitely a very informative course.”
“This class held me riveted for 4 days straight.”
“Really good organization and atmosphere. I loved the use of the wiki and the idea of building up a community. You are doing a great job!”
“Having the wiki ROCKS.”