The University of Queensland’s Microbial Genomics Lab is increasingly using RCC/QCIF-managed cloud computing resources in a bid to reduce time and financial constraints.
The lab, in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, is using cloud computing for a range of ARC and NHMRC-funded projects that use genomics to investigate multi-drug resistant superbugs. The custom-built compute infrastructure will also support rapid investigation of healthcare-associated bacterial outbreaks through a recently announced Queensland Genomics Health Alliance project.
The Microbial Genomics Lab previously relied on in-house IT hardware to run bioinformatics analyses, which require high performance compute environments. However, increased computational demands, and associated administrative overheads, led the lab’s team to seek alternatives to obtaining and maintaining their own expensive HPC hardware.
Lab head Associate Professor Scott Beatson said maintaining a physical high performance compute environment for the lab is expensive and requires a dedicated systems administrator: “Which means we have less to spend on research staff. Working with RCC enables us to future-proof our research by drawing on a team of IT experts and making better use of local and national compute facilities,” he said.
Instead of maintaining physical servers in-house, the lab’s researchers are now able to leverage the HPC cluster infrastructure of RCC to provide the computational resources they need to produce world-class research.
With RCC’s on-demand and scalable resources, the lab is supported in a flexible manner that deals with changes in requirements across studies, ranging from smaller pilots to large-scale analyses.
Combined with powerful, cloud-based biological analysis platforms, like the RCC-supported Genomics Virtual Lab (GVL), this cloud computing approach offers numerous benefits to both biologists and bioinformaticians. RCC Director Professor David Abramson said cloud resources are ideal for this type of work because RCC can provision solutions quickly without needing dedicated hardware.
RCC/QCIF bioinformatician and software developer Thom Cuddihy has spent the last three months working with the Microbial Genomics Lab to develop a customised version of a GVL compute cluster on QRIScloud, the RCC-operated and QCIF-managed Queensland node of Nectar’s national cloud computing platform. Thom's work included porting existing workflows and software to take advantage of the virtual cluster environment. He also established versioned tool environments available on both the GVL cluster and lab computers, to assist in the seamless transition from exploratory analysis on desktop machines to large-scale processing on the cloud.
RCC is happy to help all UQ researchers with their high throughput compute needs. Please contact RCC to discuss your project: rcc-support@uq.edu.au.