BGI Establishes HPC Center for Bioinformatics

By Matthew Dublin

BGI has announced a partnership with the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin — home of currently the world's second most powerful supercomputer, the Tianhe -1A — in order to take advantage of supercomputing technology to accelerate genomics research.

The joint venture will be known as the Tianhe-BGI Bioinformatics and Computing Joint Laboratory. To kick off the new collaboration, investigators from the two organizations will begin work on a new bioinformatics analysis pipeline for genomics data that will utilize the power of the Tianhe-1A supercomputer.

The Tianhe-1A supercomputer came online in October of 2010 and runs at a peak performance of roughly 2.57 petaflops per second. The system is equipped with 14,336 Xeon X5670 processors, 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 general purpose GPUs, 2,048 FeiTeng 1000 SPARC-based processors.

“In the next step, we will establish a comprehensive bioinformatics & computing platform based on Tianhe-1A. It will focus on the research and development of the high-performance software with higher efficiency, including standard analysis software, the analytical pipeline and tools for enormous data, among others.” says Guangming Liu, Director of CSCC-TJ. “We hope this new laboratory could greatly promote the applications of genomic technologies in agriculture, drug discovery and human health in Binhai New Area, and make more contributions to the society.”