High Performance Computing in Computational Biology

描述(由申请人提供)：生物信息学研究中心(BRC)与北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校(UNC Charlotte)的大学研究计算(URC)支持小组正在申请高性能计算资源，以支持NIH资助的许多计算生物学项目。该资源将提供更多的计算途径，以支持一系列计算生物学工作，包括蛋白质稳定性/弹性关系、分子动力学、蛋白质静电学、RNA二级结构预测和生物图像的数字处理等项目。所有这些工作都是极其计算密集型的，并将通过获取资源而大大推进，这是成本高昂的，对于个别项目来说很难证明是合理的。具体地说，该应用程序要求76个计算节点配备双Intel Xeon四核处理器和16 GB DIMM RAM。该集群总共包括608个计算核心、1.2 TB RAM(每个核心2 GB)、56 TB可用磁盘存储以及具有独立路径的千兆以太网互联，用于数据和并行通信。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，这将大大促进我们机构促进计算生物学最先进研究的目标。 公共卫生相关性：这一高性能计算机集群将为NIH资助的几名研究人员提供基础计算生物学研究所需的资源，包括：(1)研究细胞过程和疾病的基本机制，(2)提高核苷酸芯片的可靠性，以及(3)肿瘤细胞向肝脏转移的活体图像分析。

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.