Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
| Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative | |
|---|---|
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| Established | 2008 |
| Director | Professor Peter R Taylor |
| Location |
The University of Melbourne 187 Grattan St, Carlton, Victoria, Australia |
| Affiliations | Victorian Government, The University of Melbourne, Monash University, La Trobe University, IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences, Melbourne |
| Website | vlsci.org.au |
The Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative is an initiative of the government of Victoria in partnership with the University of Melbourne and the IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences, Melbourne. It exists for all Victorian researchers, and as at July 2012 it became the largest supercomputing facility dedicated to the life sciences in the world.
Background
The VLSCI is considered a part of the Victoria government's plans to support biotechnology, and is listed as a key infrastructure projects in the Victorian Biotechnology Action Plan 2011. The VLSCI is a $100m initiative of the Victorian Government in partnership with The University of Melbourne and the IBM Life Sciences Research Collaboratory, Melbourne. Other major stakeholders include key Victorian health and medical research institutions, major universities and public research organisations.
Key resources
The VLSCI's-high performance computation facility is accessible to all Victorian Life Sciences researchers by operating from three research hubs based in Melbourne’s Central (Parkville), South East (Clayton) and North (Bundoora) Precincts. Technical experts are on staff to maximise the user experience, meet the skills gaps in research teams, build the necessary cross-disciplinary research collaborations, and provide skills to scale up projects to efficiently use the processing power being delivered. Ongoing skills development and training is provided in computational biology, computational imaging and bioinformatics.
The Computers
VLSCI's Peak Computing Facility is operating at 855 teraflops. The systems include 'Bruce', an SGI Altix x86, 'Merri', an IBM iDataplex x86 and 'Avoca', comprising 4 racks of IBM Blue Gene/Q.
Peak Computing Facility
The VLSCI Peak Computing Facility (PCF) provides high-performance compute infrastructure and computational expertise to Life Sciences researchers across Victoria. The PCF has tightly-coupled clusters with very fast disk subsystems, currently operating at a peak capacity of 855 teraflops. To help researchers maximize their use of compute time and get the most out of their allocated resources, the PCF has a team of system administrators, programmers and application specialists accessible through its help request system.
Life Sciences Computation Centre
The VLSCI Life Science Computation Centre (LSCC) is a cross-institution centre composed of hubs in three research precincts: Central (Parkville), South-East (Clayton) and North (Bundoora), physically housed at the Universities of Melbourne, Monash and La Trobe respectively. The LSCC can be seen as a distributed pool of expertise and infrastructure for computational life science research, servicing life science research institutions across Victoria. It aims to foster research collaboration and support to a relatively small number of specific external projects; act as a source of common resources, software platforms and expertise to support life science researchers; offer research training, education, and career development for bioinformaticians and computational biologists, to support the advancement of the Victorian computational life sciences research community; and support the advancement of life science computation as a whole in Victoria.
IBM Collaboratory for Life Sciences, Melbourne
Co-located at VLSCI is the first IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences. The IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences - Melbourne enables collaboration between the 10,000 world-class life sciences and medical researchers in the Melbourne area, and IBM’s computational biology experts.
Scientists from the VLSCI and IBM Research are working to accelerate the translation of theoretical biological knowledge into practical improvements in medical care and health outcomes