By Matthew Dublin

Despite tough economic times all around, coffers have continued to flow in the direction of HPC sites and labs developing bioinformatics tools. Just today, the Ohio Supercomputer Center announced that they have received a cool $4 million expansion to its main system, an IBM Cluster 1350. The IBM system now has even faster, more powerful IBM hardware, which Ohio Supercomputer Center executive director Stanley Ahalt says will be used for bioscience research and other projects deemed worthy by the state.

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences awarded a $786,797 grant to Stephen Eubank, a professor and Deputy Director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at Virginia Tech's Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, to support ongoing work to develop HPC models to study the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, such as the H1N1 influenza. The creation of these infectious disease models can help design targeted intervention strategies for the effective use of public health resources to combat the spread of disease.

The National Science Foundation has also awarded a three-year $1,421,725 grant to Jean Peccoud, associate professor at VBI, to develop a web-based design environment for synthetic biology called GenoCAD, which guides the user through the process of designing new sequences.

Finally, the University of Chicago announced on Monday that a $30 million National Science Foundation grant will allow the TeraGrid to operate until 2011. The TeraGrid is a national system of interconnected supercomputers devoted to all sorts of different research areas, including biology. It is currently the world's largest computer storage and networking system for open scientific research.