The Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative is an initiative of the government of Victoria

Victoria (Australia)

Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....

 in partnership with the University of Melbourne

University of Melbourne

The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...

 and the IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences, Melbourne. It exists for all Victorian researchers, and aims to be one of the top 5 life science computation facilities by 2013.

Background

The VLSCI is considered a part of the Victoria government's plans to support biotechnology

Biotechnology

Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...

, 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

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

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

As of 2011, VLSCI's Peak Computing Facility is at Stage 1, operating at 46 teraflops. Stage 2, scheduled to begin in 2013, will delivering petascale computing in 2013. The systems include 'Bruce', an SGI Altix x86, 'Merri', an IBM iDataplex x86 and 'Tambo', the largest IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer installation devoted to the Life Sciences in the Southern Hemisphere.

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 46 teraflops and building to petascale computing by 2013. 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