The Bioinformatics And Computational Data Centre in the Institute of Biochemistry offers services and bioinformatics solutions ranging from large-scale systems biology analyses.
Bioinformatics technologies are playing a significant and increasing role in life sciences research and as these technologies advance so does the data complexity.
The Bioinformatics And Computational Data Centre in the Institute of Biochemistry offers services and bioinformatics solutions ranging from large-scale systems biology analyses, in which entire OMICs are considered, up to the nano-scale experiments, in which molecular simulations can give insights into the structure and dynamics of the molecular complexes of biological components.
Tackling this kind of research obviously requires a highly specialised level of computing and statistical expertise, as well as high performance resources. As such, the Bioinformatics And Computational Data Centre seeks to provide support and efficient infrastructure to all bioinformatics pipelines used in the Institute.
Briefly, the bioinformatics infrastructure at the Institute of Biochemistry includes two high performance computing clusters: one CPU-intensive cluster formed of 14 HP BL280c nodes (a total of 200 CPU cores) and one GPU-intensive cluster formed of 4 HP SL390s nodes (a total of 24 GPU cores). In total these two clusters provide approximately 5 Tflops of processing capacity. In addition, the facility was recently expanded with several stand-alone workstations (each containing 1-2 GPU cards), currently dedicated to machine learning processing and molecular dynamics simulations, and benefits from fast-access storage solutions (including two newly acquired storage servers). Servers dedicated to administrative tasks are also hosted in the facility and are serving the Institute’s internal needs. Reliable fiber-optic Internet access connections, via the RoEduNet network are also supporting the bioinformatic and informatics activities in the Institute.
The facility provides excellent technical support for computational and bioinformatics projects in all departments, through the junior and senior bioinformaticians associated with the two research groups in the Bioinformatics and Structural Biochemistry Department.
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