Biocomputing Technology Core

Institute for Genomics and Proteomics (IGP)

Molecular surface model showing a hexagonal protein lattice with alternating red and blue electrostatic regions.

Leadership

Duilio Cascio

Duilio Cascio

Manager of the X-ray and EM Structure Determination Core and the Biocomputing Technology Core

Contact

Email: cascio@mbi.ucla.edu

Phone: 310-825-1551

Website: Biocomputing Technology

Services

  1. Evaluation, purchase, set up, and maintenance of the computer hardware and network for the 170 users in the research groups of the PIs and Associate Members of the Division of Structural Biology and Genetics.
  2. Development and acquisition of software and installation and maintenance of software for the Division of Structural Biology and Genetics, including programs for the determination, display, and interpretation of molecular structures.
  3. In-person instruction in the use of hardware, software and graphics.
  4. Development and maintenance of the World Wide Web sites of the Division of Structural Biology and Genetics and partnering units, including the home-grown UCLA-DOE web servers, FAES, Twin Detection, Diffraction Anisotropy Server, Surface Entropy Reduction Server, Structure Verification servers such as ERRAT, Verify3D, and other programs for sequence and structure analysis (SAVES).
  5. Maintenance of publicly accessible databases developed in the Division such as  the MCPdb (Bacterial Microcompartment Database), DIP (Database of Interacting Proteins), Amyloid Atlas  LARKSdb, ZipperDB, and of databases and programs for internal use.

Facilities and Equipment

A network of servers and graphic workstations has been established, made up of an HPC cluster of 100 Multicore Linux compute servers, 54 GPU servers using the SLURM workload manager and queuing system and 72 Linux workstations, which are connected together by a high speed network of fiber optics. All the web, mail, SQL  servers and  Petabyte storage systems, are housed in air-conditioned computer rooms.

The BioComputing Technology Core is supported by a professional staff of two, who maintain both hardware and software and are available on demand to help when needed. With oversight from the core manager, the staff works with an enormous range of user skills, from professional programmers to complete novices. When new programs or systems are introduced, the core often provides classes for groups and in-person training of new users.

Pricing

  • To recover the cost of the supporting personnel, Disk drives replacements, and file servers,  a fee will be charged to researchers.
  • The fee structure is to provide computational resources to allow a  3-way high availability storage and backup of valuable scientific data in high performance file servers and 40Gb network infrastructure. We provide internal and external storage up to 2 Petabytes of data storage.
  • The approved quarterly rate by Sales and Service is $2.75/Gb of solid state disk storage.
  • A PI should anticipate a  charge of around  1000 Gb  per quarter  to store and process scientific data.
  • New users should discuss setting up a recharge account with the Biocomputing Technology Core Director.