Hi all; I've recently gotten a local Galaxy install up and running for our group. We do a lot of short read sequencing analysis and are looking at Galaxy as a framework to present the data and custom analyses associated with it. One of our main interests is scaling the presentation to large fastq and alignment files. Specifically, we have a case where we'd like to make a large ~300Gb alignment file available to users to query and retrieve sections of alignments corresponding to genomic coordinates. We have a custom C++ program that does this, and would like to plug it in through the tools interface. We'd ideally like to use the Library permissions interface to make this available to certain users. Would anyone be able to offer some advice about the best way to handle this? The standard upload, history, analyze would not be ideal since this large file would be copied around. We've brainstormed 3 different ways to approach this: - Have "special" uploaded files which are actually symlinks to the original file and do not get copied. This looks relatively difficult on my initial assessment. - Pass the logged in user to the C++ program and embed the logic of finding the right file within the external tool. Here we would need some advice about if it were possible to pass the current user through the tools interface. - The hack solution: upload a file that is actually just a link reference to the desired file, and this file gets passed to the external tool. The tool then can read the tiny file, know what large file to access, and proceed from there. This would involve some new datatype integration to handle the hack. I am still relatively uninitiated in the Galaxy way, so could use some advice on if any of these solutions are more likely to work smoothly then others. Generally, what sort of approach is Galaxy taking towards increasingly massive files? Is anyone else doing something similar? Thanks for any thoughts, Brad