In the scope of Bioinformatics Open Days, the BioData.pt organized a Special Session about the distributed Portuguese Infrastructure of Biological Data, which serves the national scientific system in its strategies and research programs. 

Bioinformatics Masters and PhD students and their coordinators and professors were the target for this session.

The session’s participants were challenged to ask a question regarding the way the Biodata.pt infrastructure can support and foster their research studies.  

As result, technical questions were made about the maximum resource usage per user the infrastructure can handle, how the user support is provided to help new researchers to use the available resources, and if Docker based images/containers can be run within the distributed computing resources offered by Biodata.pt.

The session organizers answered these questions and admitted that, given the increasing adoption of Docker based tools in the bioinformatics community, the BioData.pt infrastructure will be updated to fully support distributed Docker based computing after solving all the security concerns associated with this new technology.

The PhD student that asked about Docker support in the BioData.pt infrastructure was awarded with a course at IGC.

Different Biodata.pt Platforms and Communities researchers approaching Plants and Cork Oak presented their latest researches with some concrete examples of their work. 

At the end of the session a profitable debate about how the BioData.pt Communities could better serve the academic and industry interests occurred.