2010 Best Practices Competition IT & Informatics HPC

Published Resources for the Life Sciences
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Government and among the worldwide scientific network of biomedical researchers. Both the Operations and
Engineering Branch (OEB) and the Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch (BCBB) are branches
of the OCICB.
The OEB provides technical and tactical cyber technologies management and support for NIAID extramural
biomedical research programs. OEB delivers essential and assured services to facilitate communication using
electronic systems and a collegial, authorized, and accessible framework for automated information sharing
and collaboration. The BCBB provides three suites of scientific services and resources for the NIAID research
community and its collaborators: Biocomputing Research Consulting, Bioinformatics Software Development,
and Scientific Computing Infrastructure.
The primary objectives of the ‘Centralized and Scalable NIAID Infrastructure’ project include the following:
• To assist NIAID laboratories in assessing their infrastructure needs for data storage and analysis of
massively‐parallel sequencing.
• To procure, operate, and maintain computing hardware that supports the data storage and processing
needs for Next Generation Sequencing across the Institute.
• To procure, build, and assist in the use of third‐party applications to be hosted on the NIAID Linux High
Performance Computing Cluster.
• To provide a robust, reliable, cost‐effective, and scalable cyber infrastructure that will serve as the
foundation to support Next Generation Sequencing at the NIAID.
A secondary objective of this project is to develop a standardized process for handling infrastructure requests
for similar high‐performance computing endeavors that will require access to large amounts of data storage
and processing.
Project responsibilities of the OCICB Operations and Engineering Branch include:
• Designing and provisioning appropriate resources to meet the scientific and business goals of the
Institute
• Consulting regularly with clients to assess performance and modify the core facility to maintain
appropriate performance
• Selecting and managing the operating system, grid engine, and parallelizing software for computing
resources
• Selecting, developing, maintaining, and managing computing resources pursuant to effective processing
of associated data
• Selecting, developing, maintaining, and managing the enterprise storage components
• Selecting, developing, maintaining, and managing effective networking components
• Managing the security of the data, operating systems, appliances, and applications
• Provisioning user accounts necessary for user applications
• Collaborating with the Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch to ensure appropriate
resources are provisioned that enable effective use of the facility
The Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch’s responsibilities include:
• Facilitating coordination and communications among OCICB groups and NIAID laboratories