LICR NewsLink

March 2004

LICR Office of Information Technology - An exciting new role and a big, big move

It was Friday the 13th, an inauspicious date, when the email was sent to all LICR staff. On Valentine's Day, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) would be moving to new quarters in the University of Lausanne, and thus the LICR website and email services would be temporarily disrupted. A cool, calm email that heralded the result of an exciting partnership recently established between LICR, several top Swiss academic organizations, and two industrial partners.

 

The Partnership

“Vital-IT” (http://www.isb-sib.ch/groups/vitalit.htm) was formed between LICR, the Universities of Lausanne, Geneva, and Basel, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Hewlett-Packard, and Intel. Vital-IT is an innovative joint venture to develop high-performance computing tools and infrastructure for the IT needs of life science researchers. The Vital-IT Project Manager is none other than LICR’s very own Director of the OIT, Dr. Victor Jongeneel. Dr. Jongeneel’s appointment as Project Manager of Vital-IT is a remarkably prestigious appointment for him personally, and also recognizes the excellence of the OIT’s work.

Vital-IT will provide support for research conducted within LICR and the other academic partners, through access to high-performance hardware (supplied by the industrial partners) and assistance with software development and implementation. An early LICR project to benefit from Vital-IT is a study from Dr. Olivier Michielin (Lausanne Branch) in which advanced computation has been used to determine the binding free energy of T cell receptor (TCR)/major histocompatibility complex (MHC)/peptide complexes. This project opens the way to rational in silico design of peptide cancer vaccines. Vital-IT is also extending the OIT’s initial development of dedicated working environments for microarray and proteomic technologies; applications that already directly benefit several LICR research groups.

The relocation of OIT to the new Vital-IT offices gives LICR substantial benefits in terms of the superior equipment and larger, furnished office space available to the OIT team. Through Vital-IT, LICR is now able to use state-of the-art servers and associated hardware, which are continuously upgraded by Hewlett-Packard and Intel, and thus greatly increase processing speed and online storage (over two terabytes!) for the LICR’s internet and intranet sites, email services, and bioinformatics databases.

 

The Move

Although the OIT’s new role and location have enormous advantages for LICR, there was one rather large obstacle to overcome before the advantages could be fully enjoyed - the physical relocation of the Office and its equipment. The team had to first dismantle and pack the hardware, and then reassemble the ‘old’ hardware and integrate it with the new. Through a truly heroic effort, a team comprised of scientists from LICR’s OIT and from other groups within the SIB got the move accomplished with virtually no disruption to LICR services. Special mention must go to Dr. Christian Iseli, the LICR Systems Manager and Lead Programmer, and Mr. Volker Flegel, the Assistant System Manager and Programmer for the Vital-IT group, who both worked into the early hours of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings to get the systems back online. The longest shift, we are told, went from 8am on Saturday morning through to 6am on Sunday morning. Our appreciation and thanks go to the whole team for their hard work and dedication!

Remember that the Office now has a new address and telephone numbers:
Office of Information Technology
Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research
BEP, UNIL
CH-1015 Lausanne-Dorigny, Switzerland

Use the Staff Directory (http://www2.licr.org/LICR-DB/NewLook/) to find the new staff phone and fax numbers.