Facilities
The Center for Evolutionary Functional Genomics is housed in Building A of the Biodesign Institute. The Center is host to a cutting-edge scientific computing facility designed to accommodate the large-scale, computationally intensive research being performed by their scientists.
In order to meet the infrastructural needs of a modern informatics center, these scientists utilized the latest advances in both computer hardware and networking technology. The server-computing core contains over fifty high-end server machines as well as two terabyte-scale storage disk arrays. Researchers have access to a variety of computing architectures within the server-computing core including 64-bit Apple G5 and Intel Xeon class systems. Each system is connected to a fully switched 1000 Mbps Ethernet network that extends directly to researcher workstations. In total, the Center's server-computing core is able to provide >300 Gigaflops of computing power and >5 Terabytes of data storage. The Center's scientists are currently utilizing these computing resources to develop bioinformatics software tools for the web, implement terabyte-scale genomic databases, perform computationally intensive simulations, execute large-scale analyses on terabyte-scale data sets, and to provide public-access to informatics resources the broader research community.
The ultimate purpose of the Center's computing facility is to provide an advanced, scalable informatics computing infrastructure that is capable of keeping pace with the cutting edge of informatics research, and which allows our researchers to embrace the collaborative spirit of the Biodesign Institute through public access to novel informatics resources.
