Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
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| Established | 2008 |
|---|---|
| Director | Acting Director Prof Justin Zobel |
| Location |
The University of Melbourne LAB-14, 700 Swanston St, Carlton, Victoria, Australia |
| Affiliations | Victorian Government, The University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, RMIT, Deakin University |
| Website | vlsci.org.au |
The Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative is funded by the Victorian Government and contributing institutions and is hosted by the University of Melbourne. This petascale facility delivers expertise and systems for life sciences computing.
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 was established as 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 included key Victorian health and medical research institutions, major universities and public research organisations.
In 2015 the VLSCI transitioned to a new governance model after receiving a further $6.65m from the Victorian State Government. The first IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences was co-located at VLSCI for 5 years. Since moving to the nearby offices of IBM Research Australia, Collaboratory staff continue to work on a range of projects as part of a broader University of Melbourne/IBM partnership.
Key resources
The VLSCI's-high performance computation facility is accessible to all Victorian Life Sciences researchers by operating across various universities and research institutes in Melbourne. 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, molecular modelling and bioinformatics.
The Computers
VLSCI's Peak Computing Facility is operating at 855 teraflops. The systems include 'Barcoo', an IBM iDataplex 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 physically housed at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University, and with many staff working at various research institutes including the Peter Doherty Institute for some portion of their week. 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.