Message of the Day.
A course on "Computational Analysis of Ultra-High-Throughput (UHT) Sequencing Data"
will use the Vital-IT infrastructure from the:
13th Sep. 2010 until the 17th Sep. 2010.
The load on our computing infrastructure may be higher during this time.
Please contact us if you need more information.
(VF, 05.08.2010)
The main activities undertaken by Vital-IT are:
- Providing an HPC environment to support the research work of its partners, in areas ranging from sequence analysis through molecular modelling to image processing
- Developing specialist software engineering techniques for parallelization, optimization and validation of complex algorithms.
- Development activities to turn concepts derived from research into robust software solutions.
- Consulting and educational activities geared towards the computational needs of companies in the life sciences.
- Acting as an agent for new collaborations with industry and in future, including potential spin-off of new companies in the field of life-science informatics.
A short video (48 MBytes, Windows Media Format) describing the activities of Vital-IT in relation to cancer research is available.
A Center of Excellence for Computation
Vital-IT is equipped with several large Linux clusters for computationally intensive applications with a high level of parallelism (requiring high performance communications) and a farm of compute nodes for applications with a loosely coupled level of parallelism, totaling more than 2 Teraflops peak performance and more than 13 TeraBytes disk storage capacity. The infrastructure also includes several database servers and a large shared-memory machine. The facility mirrors a large number of important bio-databases, and also provides a powerful cross-indexing capability.
The core team consists of about 10 people responsible for system management, software development and software engineering for HPC applications, business development and administration.
Developing Innovative, Validated, Robust Software
The Vital-IT team has developed deep expertise in methods for ensuring that software developed by its partners meets essential requirements for quality assurance, maintainability and portability. It has special expertise in validation of software across multiple platforms, where differences in machine architectures, floating point representations, compilers, etc. lead to portability issues, and where careful optimizations are required to avoid subtle problems of consistency of results.
An Extended Research Community
Research is carried out by our partner institutions within the "Pôle de Génomique Fonctionelle" formed by the universities of the Lake Geneva area. Each of these institutions collaborates with industrial partners (in bioengineering, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, food science, chemistry, software and IT) and some also work closely with nearby science parks. The positioning of Vital-IT in this excellent scientific environment reinforces its attractiveness for potential partners and leverages new collaborative opportunities.
In addition, our close working relationship with Hewlett-Packard and Intel allows us, working together, to create innovative computational solutions to life science problems.