Bioinformatics core service servers hosted in the IS department server room.



Bioinformatics core service servers hosted in the IS department server room.

The facility has several first-class Linux-based HP ProLiant and Dell PowerEdge servers for computationally intensive data analysis. Among them, a Dell PowerEdge server with customized TimeLogic Decypher hardware acceleration cards is dedicated for high-throughput local alignment-based sequences analyses such as BLAST searches and HMM searches. Usage priority is given to internal researchers and external collaborators of the Foundationâ??s ongoing research projects. The facility receives assistances from the IS department on hardware maintenance.

The facility has developed various software systems and custom tools to facilitate first-hand data analyses. Particularly, an in-house sequence processing pipeline handles high-throughput EST/genomic sequence cleaning, assembly and statistical data acquisition. A web system named Personal BLAST Navigator (PLAN) automates BLAST searches and assists managing BLAST results, mining gene functional information of particular research interests, and publishing gene annotation data. In addition, the facility has deployed a variety of GNU software to meet the computational needs of in the Foundation. These software are hosted on servers dedicated for internal use. Some of them are available to external collaborators and public users. Particularly, the PLAN system is publicly available at bioinfo.noble.org/plan/.