Scaling Scientific Workflows in Europe: Architecture and Deployment of the Galaxy-Pulsar Computational Network

The exponential growth of data-intensive research in the Life Sciences and other scientific domains has led to an increasing demand for computational resources across Europe. While major EU initiatives have supported the development of large-scale infrastructures, researchers still face significant challenges in accessing and integrating heterogeneous computing environments. Fragmentation in both technical architectures and policy frameworks continues to hinder seamless interoperability and efficient resource sharing. To address these challenges, we present the European Pulsar Network, a distributed computing architecture built upon the Galaxy workflow management system and the Pulsar job execution service. The network enables transparent job offloading from Galaxy servers to remote computing clusters, allowing resource scaling without requiring direct user intervention or awareness. This architecture supports a flexible and scalable approach to workload distribution, ensuring improved performance and resource availability across different infrastructures. A key component of the network is the Open Infrastructure framework, which facilitates the streamlined deployment of both Galaxy servers and Pulsar endpoints by compute providers. This is achieved through automation tools such as Terraform and Ansible, eliminating the need for manual reconfiguration of existing systems. This approach promotes simplified integration and ease of adoption by new sites. To date, the European Pulsar Network comprises six national Galaxy endpoints, other than the central European instance, and thirteen Pulsar endpoints distributed across Europe. This collaborative effort is actively enhancing the scalability, resilience, and interoperability of the Galaxy ecosystem in support of FAIR and reproducible data analysis.