Organizing and running bioinformatics hackathons within Africa: The H3ABioNet cloud computing experience

• DOI: 10.12688/aasopenres.12847.2
• Publication Date: 2019-08-07T09:25:08Z
• Authors: Azza E. Ahmed; Phelelani T. Mpan...; Sumir Panji; Shakuntala Baichoo; Yassine Souilmi; Faisal M. Fadlelmola; Mustafa Alghali; Shaun Aron; Hocine Bendou; Eugene De Beste; Mamana Mbiyavanga; Oussema Souiai; Long Yi; Jennie Zermeno; Don Armstrong; Brian D. O'Connor; Liudmila Sergeevn...; Michael R. Crusoe; Ayton Meintjes; Peter Van Heusden; Gerrit Botha; Fourie Joubert; C. Victor Jongeneel; Scott Hazelhurst; Nicola Mulder
• Keywords: 0303 health sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; Method Article; 3. Good health

<ns4:p>The need for portable and reproducible genomics analysis pipelines is growing globally as well in Africa, especially with the growth of collaborative projects like Human Health Heredity Africa Consortium (H3Africa). The Pan-African H3Africa Bioinformatics Network (H3ABioNet) recognized portable, adapted to heterogeneous computing environments, nurturing technical expertise workflow languages containerization technologies. Building on network’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) common genomic analyses, H3ABioNet arranged its first Cloud Computing Reproducible Workflows Hackathon 2016, purpose translating those SOPs into able run environments meeting needs research projects. This paper describes preparations this hackathon reflects upon lessons learned about impact building scientific African researchers. workflows developed were made publicly available GitHub repositories deposited container images Quay.io.</ns4:p>