Chapter 10 Overview

This section describes how to get your students set up to access AnVIL. These steps will need to be repeated for each new offering of the course.

If you are new to AnVIL, we strongly recommend seeking funding through NHGRI / STRIDES for teaching your course. In order to prevent abuse, Google sets certain limits on cloud resources available to new users that can complicate teaching (e.g. project quotas). As you or your institution builds a payment history with Google, the limits on your accounts will be relaxed. In the meantime, STRIDES funding can help ensure your initial classes run smoothly.

What is STRIDES? NHGRI’s strategic vision highlights the importance of training the next generation of genomic scientists. In collaboration with the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy, NHGRI makes funding available to AnVIL users through the STRIDES program, which aims to promote biological research in cloud environments.

To inquire about funding your class on AnVIL, please contact help@lists.anvilproject.org.

Notify Terra

In addition to setting up your class, you may want to contact Terra to submit a request for a hold on scheduled maintenance and downtime. Contacting Terra ahead of your class time helps the Terra team avoid any major disruptions to your class. It’s also a good idea to ask about major changes planned for the time prior to your class.

10.1 Checklist and Timeline

Here is a checklist to help you keep track of the steps for setting up and teaching on AnVIL. Details about each of these steps can be found in the AnVIL Instructor Guide. Note that this checklist is written for workshop instructors as well as classroom instructors, so some of the “Event Setup” steps may not be applicable to you, depending on your teaching context.

Here is a suggested timeframe for working through the checklist:

1+ month before:

Figure out how you will fund the class/workshop.
Start working through INSTRUCTOR SETUP.
- It’s a good idea to get billing figured out with plenty of time to spare.
- Take some time to familiarize yourself with the content and make any desired updates or customizations.
Do any necessary EVENT SETUP steps.

~1 week before:

Start working through RUNNING THE CLASS.
If possible, have students log in to AnVIL and send you their usernames, so you can add them to the Student Group ahead of time. This saves time on the day of the class.
Do not add students to your Billing Project ahead of time. This prevents them from accruing costs.

Day of (or shortly before):

Add students to Billing Project.
Have students clone the Workspace (They cannot do this until you have added them to the Billing Project. As soon as they do this, they can start computing.).

After:

Collect feedback, if you didn’t do it during the class/workshop.
Work though EVENT WRAP-UP - until you shut things down, you will continue to accrue costs.