CORE D: BIOINFORMATICS CORE

University Of Texas San Antonio, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Specific Aims: The specific aims of this grant are as stated in the original proposal. B. Results: The user base has been increase dramatically since last report period. 330 registered users use the facility resources in a regular basis, and the number is increasing steadily. The facility has earned a great reputation due to its excellent services to the biological research at UTSA. The University is in the process of providing institutional support to the facility to convert it to a High Performance Computing center. To meet the increasing demands for the memory-intensive computing recourses, the facility purchased two Dell PowerEdge R900 servers, each has four quad-core CPUs and 128G memory. The capability of processing large data set has been increased significantly in the core facility. The demands for image processing and visualizing had also increased. To meet that demands, the facility purchased two more Dell high-end workstations with large screens and high quality video cards. C. Significance The Bioinformatics core facility will obtain partial support from the university and provide much broader services at UTSA. The RCMI Computational Core has provided support for currently 88 publications. 52 grants were submitted with support of the core, including 10 in the total amount of $3 million that were funded. 47 grants, totaling $20,800,000, were funded without core support, but have been receiving support by the RCMI Computational Core since they were funded. D. Plans: Data storage service is one of the major services that the facility provides. About 10-terabyte valuable research data are saved on the data storage server of the core facility. Due to the increases in the number of users and the software applications, we need an advanced data storage server with much higher reliability, much higher availability and much higher performance in the HPC environment. We are in the process of implementing an advanced cluster file system to upgrade the existing system. The data storage service will be a cutting-edge service of the core facility. The core facility is also planning to provide a series of workshops on HPC in order to help users to take the full advantage of the cutting-edge High Performance Computing resources of the core facility. CBI's High Performance Computing (HPC) system has been well utilized since it was installed in 2006. The HPC system is a 30-node cluster, and it was designed for a small group of users. CBI's user's base has been doubled in 2008, and it keeps on increasing. The existing capacity of the HPC system is not enough to serve the increasing users. We have decided to expand the existing HPC system by 20 more nodes. The equipments have been ordered and will be installed soon.