Melbourne Bioinformatics (formerly the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, VLSCI) is a centre for computational life science expertise. It provides bioinformatics support for all researchers and students in a wide range of projects and services of local and national significance. Researchers can engage with Melbourne Bioinformatics through training and consulting with experts which can lead to project collaborations with academic staff within the University of Melbourne.

History

The VLSCI was established as part of the Victorian government's plans to support

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...

, and was listed as a key infrastructure project in the Victorian Biotechnology Action Plan 2011. It was a $100m initiative of the

Victorian Government The Victoria State Government, also referred to as just the Victorian Government, is the state-level authority for Victoria, Australia. Like all state governments, it is formed by three independent branches: the executive, the judicial, and th ...

in partnership with

The University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Its main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb nor ...

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 have continued to work on a range of projects as part of a broader University of Melbourne/IBM partnership under the new name of Melbourne Bioinformatics. Vlsci pan e small-2

Melbourne Bioinformatics's petascale high performance computation facility was accessible to researchers in

Victoria Victoria most commonly refers to: * Victoria (Australia), a state of the Commonwealth of Australia * Victoria, British Columbia, provincial capital of British Columbia, Canada * Victoria (mythology), Roman goddess of Victory * Victoria, Seychelle ...

by operating across various universities and research institutes in Melbourne. The clusters were in the top 500 worldwide in 2017. Technical experts were 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 was provided in

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

, molecular modelling and bioinformatics.

The Computers

At its peak, the VLSCI's Peak Computing Facility operated at 855 teraflops. The systems included 'Barcoo', an IBM

iDataPlex System x is a line of x86 servers produced by IBM – and later by Lenovo – as a sub-brand of IBM's ''System'' brand, alongside IBM Power Systems, IBM System z and IBM System Storage. In addition, IBM System x was the main component of the I ...

x86, 'Merri', an IBM iDataPlex x86 and 'Avoca', comprising 4 racks of IBM

Blue Gene/Q Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...

Peak Computing Facility

The VLSCI Peak Computing Facility (PCF) provided high-performance compute infrastructure and computational expertise to Life Sciences researchers across Victoria. The PCF had 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 had 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) was 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 was a distributed pool of expertise and infrastructure for computational life science research, servicing life science research institutions across Victoria. It aimed 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.

Galaxy Australia

Melbourne Bioinformatics together with

QFAB Bioinformatics QFAB Bioinformatics is a Queensland-based organisation concerned with the provision of resources in bioinformatics, biostatistics and specialised computing platforms. QFAB operates Australia-wide and is a key contributor to the EMBL Australia ...

, QCIF and the

University of Queensland , mottoeng = By means of knowledge and hard work , established = , endowment = A$224.3 million , budget = A$2.1 billion , type = Public research university , chancellor = Peter Varghese , vice_chancellor = Deborah Terry , city = B ...

’
Research Computing Centre
jointly built and operate Galaxy Australia which is a major feature of the Genomics Virtual Laboratory.

References