High Performance Computing in Computational Biology

描述（由申请人提供）：北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校（UNC Charlotte）的生物信息学研究中心（BRC）和大学研究计算（URC）支持小组正在寻求高性能计算资源，以支持美国国立卫生研究院资助的许多计算生物学项目。该资源将提供扩展的计算访问，以支持一系列计算生物学工作，包括蛋白质稳定性/灵活性关系、分子动力学、蛋白质静电、RNA二级结构预测和生物图像的数字处理等项目。所有这些工作都是非常密集的计算，并且将通过访问资源而大大提高，这是成本高昂的，并且很难证明单个项目的合理性。具体来说，这个应用程序需要76个具有双Intel Xeon四核处理器和16 GB dimm RAM的计算节点。总的来说，集群包括608个计算核心，1.2 TB RAM（每个核心2 GB）， 56 TB可用磁盘存储，以及千兆以太网互连，具有用于数据和并行通信的单独路径。该资源将完全由URC（目前管理着校园内的其他几个研究集群）维护，并将存储在新的BRC大楼内的专用服务器空间中，该大楼的建造是为了统一校园在生物信息学和计算生物学方面的努力。因此，该资源将为北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校的计算资源提供广泛的增加，这将大大推进我们机构在计算生物学方面促进最先进研究的目标。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Bioinformatics Research Center (BRC), together with the University Research Computing (URC) support group, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) is requesting a high performance computing resource in support of numerous NIH-funded projects in computational biology. The resource will provide expanded computing access to support an array of computational biology efforts, including projects in protein stability/flexibility relationships, molecular dynamics, protein electrostatics, RNA secondary structure prediction, and digital processing of biological images. All of these efforts are extremely compute-intensive, and will be substantially advanced by access to the resource, which is cost-prohibitive and difficult to justify for individual projects. Specifically, this application requests 76 compute nodes with dual Intel Xeon quad-core processors and 16 GB of DIMMS RAM. In total, the cluster includes 608 computing cores, 1.2 TB RAM (2 GB per core), 56 TB of usable disk storage, and gigabit Ethernet interconnect with separate paths for data and parallel communication. The resource will be completely maintained by URC (which currently manages several other research clusters on campus), and will be stored in dedicated server space within the new BRC building, which has been constructed to unify the campus' efforts in bioinformatics and computational biology. As such, the resource will provide an extensive increase in computational resources at UNC Charlotte that will substantially advance our institution's goals of promoting state-of-the-art research in computational biology. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This high performance computer cluster will provide several NIH-funded researchers access to the resources needed for fundamental computational biology research, including: (1.) investigating fundamental mechanisms in cellular processes and disease, (2.) improving the reliability of nucleotide microarrays, and (3.) in vivo image analyses of tumor cells metastasizing to the liver.