Computational infrastructure is nowadays a crucial component of many life sciences research projects. We have been operating high-performance computing IT infrastructure at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel for the last 10 years. This system is specifically geared to the needs of life science research with respect to computational architecture, storage size and speed, as well as software stack and administration. Today, the computational and storage resources provided by the [BC]2 Basel Computational Biology Center are a key component of research projects in computational biology in Basel. It also plays an important role in the context of many experimental research projects, where data analysis is often a limiting factor. Several large collaborative systems biology projects rely on this infrastructure for both data analysis and simulation. [BC]2 is not limited to projects at the Biozentrum, but also supporting projects at other research institutes in Basel such as the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute or the Zoological Institute of the University of Basel.

The [BC]2 infrastructure has successfully supported very competitive research projects in the past. However, the current equipment, which carries the main computation load for academic research projects in computational molecular biology and systems biology in Basel, is becoming outdated. The increased extent to which high-throughput experimental techniques such as proteomics, imaging and high content screening, and next generation sequencing are being used in molecular biology labs further increases the load on our IT infrastructure.

The project “High-performance IT Infrastructure for Computational Biology” aims to upgrade and expand the [BC]2 compute and storage infrastructure in order to allow research projects to be carried out at the highest, internationally competitive, level. The project is coordinated within the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) to ensure optimal use of life science related data storage and computational resources in Switzerland.