Computing and Information Infrastructure
Computing and Information Infrastructure Roadmap
Objective: Provide hardware and software environments to support analysis, data storage, modeling, and simulation activities required in GTL.
Computational biology has an unprecedented range of computing needs that make a well-planned infrastructure essential to achieving GTL’s ambitious goals. The GTL program will require a distributed computing infrastructure that includes the ability to perform informatic analysis on a diverse collection of distributed data sets produced by a variety of experimental methods, run simulations on dedicated supercomputers, and study biological phenomena that no one yet knows how to model. The infrastructure for biology applications must provide high-speed computation for large-scale calculations but also must be compatible with much smaller-scale calculations carried out on individual investigators’ desktops. This infrastructure must be flexible, adaptable, and responsive to biology’s evolving needs. It will consist of special and general-purpose computers and tool libraries linked together and to GTL facilities, research laboratories, and the user community by a national state-of-the-art backbone. The components include:
- GTL experimental facilities and research laboratories that generate large-scale biological data, analyze and manage the data, and make the information available to the community of GTL researchers.
- Data-curation centers where data are collected under strict quality and structure protocols to support modeling and other activities.
- Special and general-purpose computers that focus on such compute-intensive applications as analyzing biological data; modeling protein and molecular-machine structures; and simulating pathways, networks, cells, and communities.
- Tool libraries and modeling repositories that collect, implement, and develop analysis, modeling, and simulation tools related to GTL tasks, making them available to biology users at GTL centers and in the community.
- A national grid (associated with ESNet) with terabit backbone and associated middleware, connecting all the centers and users to provide the scientific community with a major new capability for high-impact biological science.
Requirements for this infrastructure must grow to match estimates of data production and data analysis needed in GTL research. It will build on existing computing centers and networking resources and leverage the major DOE user facilities. In general, for at least the first decade of GTL, computing and information technologies will be available in the commercial marketplace to meet the needs of biological research without special architectures or technologies.
