Vital-IT Submissions
As you have heard, LICR is an academic partner of the "Vital-IT" project, an academia/industry partnership aiming to make high-performance computing (HPC) and software optimization expertise available to scientists in the life sciences.
Project submissions from the LICR scientific community are now being solicited. Note that each project requires a principal investigator (normally, an LICR Group Leader) as well as a person in charge of driving the project from the LICR side. This person will need enough computational knowledge and expertise to interact productively with the developers and system managers of the Vital-IT group. Each project will be evaluated by a Technical Committee, whose role it is to make sure that projects make sense scientifically, and that the necessary expertise and resources are available on both sides. Since LICR is not making a direct financial contribution to Vital-IT, the Technical Committee will not be able to consider projects that will require access to these machines in the long run (e.g. support for a core facility).
Examples of projects currently running are:
- using genetic algorithms for optimal ligand docking to macromolecules
- estimating the affinity constants of TCR/MHC-peptide interactions in silico
- linkage mapping of inheritable differences in expression of human chr21 genes
- retrogene evolution in vertebrate genomes
- modelling of the dynamics of gene evolution in animal populations
- ... and many others
In all of these cases, access to HPC allowed the research groups involved to tackle large-scale problems within acceptable computation times.
For more information, try http://www.isb-sib.ch/groups/vitalit.htm or refer to the ‘All-staff LICR’ email sent by Dr. Victor Jongeneel (Director, LICR Office of Information Technology and ‘Vital-IT’) on February 3rd, 2005.