MIPS trial Columbus with help from R@CMon

Columbus is a commercial software for image analysis, providing an on-line interface for analysis and organisation as well as web-services for integration with instrument workflows. Cameron Nowell, Facility Manager within the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) Drug Discovery Biology group, required an evaluation instance of the server.

The software is licensed and requires a USB dongle to be connected to the server at all times, the system also requires powerful server hardware with plenty of memory and large storage. These factors combine to make it difficult to trial such software as such machines are not easy (or cheap!) to come by and they usually physically live in the data-centre that presents various security issues.

Undeterred by these challenges the R@CMon team arranged to pilot the solution using an m2.xlarge Research Cloud virtual server (12 cores, 50GB RAM and a 2TB network storage Ceph volume attached). Without a remote USB over IP switching device available, connecting the license dongle to the server was a major challenge. Due to the short nature of the trial and the dynamic provisioning used in the R@CMon cloud we wanted to avoid physical insertion of the dongle into the server. In order to connect the license dongle we built the (somewhat experimental) usbip staging driver for the CentOS/RHEL 6 kernel required by Columbus and forwarded the USB device from an office desktop over a secure SSH tunnel to the Columbus server running in the cloud (this approach allows virtually connecting USB devices across the Internet).

The Research Cloud virtual server solution provided by R@CMon enabled MIPS to trial and evaluate the software in an efficient, cost effective and practical way.