Computing Resources

One of the purposes of the FGCZ is to support reuse and synergy of experimental results among the research groups using our facilities. Towards this goal the FGCZ provides central an extensive computing environment and a state of the art collection of software packages. All data generated during experiments is stored at our central data repository. All experimental data is already centrally stored, and may be processed and analyzed using extensive computing facilities available to our users.

Infrastructure

The computing infrastructure at the FGCZ is highly diverse and includes about 50 PCs attached to the instruments, about 10 user analysis PCs and 20 servers. The servers manage the data from the instruments, do backups, serve 20 printers and provide a central user database. Due to the fact, that some of the Bio-Informatic Software needs databases in the background, some Oracle Databases and a Microsoft SQL Server, besides several OpenSource databases (Mysql, Postgresql) are installed and managed by our IT service for this purpose. Additionally to the user analysis PCs, there are two Citrix Terminal Servers serving several applications via remote access.

The servers can handle the data fast and reliable through a SAN (Storage Area Network) with redundant FibreChannel connections. Among the servers we have a Gbit LAN.

Large FGCZ computing jobs are done on High Performance Computing Clusters of UZH.

Applications

We support a lot of specialized applications, such as Samespots, Proteomweaver, MassLynx, Partek, Genespring, Affymetrix Microarray Suite and others. Due to the high-speed network connection most of this applications can be accessed from outside the lab via our citrix based windows terminal server.

Security

All instruments and computing gear is located in a switched 100 MBit/s ethernet LAN. We run our own domain controller, Active Directory server etc.. It is protected behind a firewall that may be tunneled using our VPN (Virtual Private Network) gateway. Users from outside the FGCZ may access our computing facilities through this secure VPN connections, e.g. to perform remote GeneSpring computations. Standard procedures, automated Windows installations, centrally managed backup and anti virus utilities provide a high security and safety level.

High Performance Computing

For computationally intensive tasks, mainly the proteome projects for the species Arabidopsis thaliana, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Drososphila melanogaster (C-MOP), we use the High Performance Computing Clusters of the University of Zurich having up to one thousand compute nodes available. The protein and peptide assignment is performed by using Thermo's SEQUEST and GPM's X!TANDEM software. Furthermore, we utilize the cluster for profiling hidden Markov models for protein sequence and first aid blast annotations. For special research questions we implement customized solutions. (Contact: Christian Panse)