MAGNet: IT Infrastructure
- Editor's note: The MAGNet center formally closed in July 2016, following the mandatory conclusion of its grant after more than 10 years of activity. The pages in this section constitute an archive of its work.
The MAGNet Center leverages the world class IT infrastructure of the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2) and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) which comprises one of the largest academic computing environments devoted to molecular and systems biology. Capabilities include microarray data analysis and storage, sequence and pathway analysis, and extend all the way to MAGNet tools for Systems and Structural biology. The computing equipment is housed in several modern datacenters located in the HICCC and in the Russ Berrie Pavilion. The infrastructure is accessible to all MAGNet investigators and their collaborators, as well as to external scientists through consulting engagements with the HICCC Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource or through hosted services agreements with C2B2.
Hardware: State-of-the-art clusters (with a combined total of more than 4000 CPUs) are available for large-scale computational jobs, and are supported by a full set of servers for databases, web applications, large memory SMP jobs, grid-computing, and automated backup. The clusters are used both to run existing software and for custom development, for which a full set of compilers is available.
Software: A variety of both licensed and open-source packages are supported that span the full range of bioinformatics tasks.
Databases: C2B2 members themselves create and maintain a number of widely-used databases. In addition, all important sequence and structure databases are maintained centrally. This allows direct large-scale searches, if need be using custom algorithms and cluster computing.
geWorkbench server-side infrastructure: Many MAGNet tools and databases are implemented as deployed as server-side grid services and are accessible to geWorkbench clients.
Communications: C2B2 provides a dedicated conference room equipped with modern wide-screen video conferencing capabilities which is used for hosting multi site meetings and training sessions.
Support: A professional systems support team designs and maintains the datacenters in which the servers are housed, and support C2B2/HICCC members in both desktop and cluster computing.