A project involving researchers at the University of St Andrews’ School of Biology and School of Medicine and members of STFC‘s Computational Biology Group at the Daresbury Laboratory has been awarded 1,000,000 core-hours on the IBM Blue Joule supercomputer at the Hartree Centre. This allocation will make possible an amount of computation equivalent to running a dual-core laptop non-stop for around 60 years.

This supercomputer time will allow development of advanced phylogeny reconstruction algorithms and their application to extremely large problems. New methods will be developed to handle the vast amounts of data now available from low-cost DNA sequencing, but which are impossible to analyze using traditional approaches.

This work builds on a current research collaboration between St Andrews and STFC, High-Performance Computing in the Search for the Tree of Life. New algorithms will be made available in the open-source phylogeny program LVB.

The computer time was allocated in the STFC Hartree Centre’s 3rd Blue Joule Access Programme. The research will involve Dr Miguel Pinheiro, Professor Thomas Meagher and Dr Daniel Barker (PI) at St Andrews and Dr Martyn Winn, Dr Chang-Sik Kim and colleagues at STFC.

Monday 30 March 2015