TGAC in the spotlight at largest global supercomputing conference

The supercomputing conference spotlights the most innovative and fascinating scientific and technical applications from around the world, bringing together the HPC community – with over 10,000 attendees.

Director Mario Caccamo, Head of Scientific Computing Tim Stitt and Paul Fretter from Norwich Bioscience Institutes (NBI) attended from TGAC. Tim Stitt presented a talk entitled, “Beyond Human – Sequencing the Complex Wheat Genome to Advance Global Food Security" at the annual SGI User Forum; one of only four invited talks from SGI's global customer base.

Tim also represented the UK and Europe at the annual gathering of XSEDE campus champions. XSEDE is a five-year, $121 million US National Science Foundation project, for developing the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world.

“With an attendance of over 10,000 people, the networking opportunities at the conference provided tremendous visibility for TGAC and its research,” said Tim Stitt, TGAC’s lead at the conference. “In addition to attending technical programme presentations, myself, Mario and Paul attended many vendor briefings throughout the week with the leaders in HPC and supercomputing technology including SGI, Intel, Cray Inc. and IBM.”

At these closed-door sessions, attendees heard from each company about their upcoming technology roadmaps over the next 5-10 years. Such information is crucial to helping shape TGAC's own HPC roadmap so attendance at these meetings is vital to sustaining TGAC's computational leadership at the forefront of Bioscience.

TGAC’s research, in association with Intel, has also been promoted by a video recently shot onsite at the Institute that focuses on its HPC capabilities to sequence and assemble one of the most complex genomes, the bread wheat genome.

Robert Maskell, High Performance Computing at Intel, said: “Intel is delighted to welcome TGAC to SC14 where will continue our close collaboration to help accelerate the pace of discovery of TGACs research agenda.”

Simon Appleby, Life Sciences Manager (EMEA) at SGI, added: “SGI has been privileged to collaborate with TGAC to accelerate their highly recognized and valued research output since 2010. The high performance X86-64 shared memory ‘UV’ architectures procured by TGAC have allowed for rapid deployment when exploring cutting edge software, new algorithms and programming models without restrictions artificially placed by the fixed resources on a cluster node, such as memory. This freedom in computational capacity now allows TGAC biologists to assemble and analyse large and complex genome sequences entirely in memory, with extreme ease of use, which was not previously possible. We look forward to continued collaboration with TGAC to promote their research and capabilities on the international stage.”

Running alongside the SC14 technical program of around 5,000 participants, the SC14 Exhibition Hall hosts over 350 exhibitors featuring the latest and greatest technologies from industry, academia and government research organisations; many of these technologies will be seen for the first time in New Orleans. The keynote speaker at SC14 was physicist and best-selling author Brian Greene.

Watch TGAC-Intel’s video ‘TGAC Understanding Life on Earth’, full customer reference case-study can be seen here.


About TGAC
The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) is a world-class research institute focusing on the development of genomics and computational biology. TGAC is based within the Norwich Research Park and receives strategic funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) - £7.4M in 2013/14 - as well as support from other research funders. TGAC is one of eight institutes that receive strategic funding from BBSRC. TGAC operates a National Capability to promote the application of genomics and bioinformatics to advance bioscience research and innovation.

TGAC offers state of the art DNA sequencing facility, unique by its operation of multiple complementary technologies for data generation. The Institute is a UK hub for innovative Bioinformatics through research, analysis and interpretation of multiple, complex data sets. It hosts one of the largest computing hardware facilities dedicated to life science research in Europe. It is also actively involved in developing novel platforms to provide access to computational tools and processing capacity for multiple academic and industrial users and promoting applications of computational Bioscience. Additionally, the Institute offers a Training programme through courses and workshops, and an Outreach programme targeting schools, teachers and the general public through dialogue and science communication activities. www.tgac.ac.uk

About BBSRC
BBSRC invests in world-class bioscience research and training on behalf of the UK public. Our aim is to further scientific knowledge, to promote economic growth, wealth and job creation and to improve quality of life in the UK and beyond.

Funded by Government, and with an annual budget of around £467M (2012-2013), we support research and training in universities and strategically funded institutes. BBSRC research and the people we fund are helping society to meet major challenges, including food security, green energy and healthier, longer lives. Our investments underpin important UK economic sectors, such as farming, food, industrial biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.

For more information about BBSRC, our science and our impact see: www.bbsrc.ac.uk

For more information about BBSRC strategically funded institutes see: www.bbsrc.ac.uk/institutes

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For more information, please contact:

Hayley London
Marketing & Communications Officer, The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC)
T: +44 (0) 1603 450107
E: [email protected]

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