National Center for Genome Analysis Program Year 1 Report – September 15, 2011 – September 14, 2012

Abstract

On September 15, 2011, Indiana University (IU) received three years of support to establish the National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS). This technical report describes the activities of the first 12 months of NCGAS, during which time NCGAS brought online a large-RAM computational cluster, recruited 25 NSF-funded genomics projects to use the resource, responded to 502 requests for support, and processed 28,523 computational jobs representing a total of 136.83 core years of computing.

NCGAS also laid the framework for creating a truly national-scale center supporting genomics research. By coordinating effort between multiple supercomputing centers, NCGAS is creating a service-oriented computational infrastructure – one that is designed to be approachable by end-users unaccustomed to using traditional supercomputing resources. The benefits of such inter-institutional coordination can be seen from events such as the NCGAS co-hosted Daphnia Genomics Jamboree. At this gathering, dozens of scientists from across the US and Europe spent five days accelerating the completion of the Daphnia manga genome. NCGAS-supported staff from both Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and IU gave presentations early in the Jamboree before participants broke into small teams and used NCGAS clusters to perform their analyses. NCGAS also established a Galaxy web portal to allow researchers to use our large-RAM cluster with a familiar web interface, and we worked to increase the computational efficiency of the best-in-class Trinity application for RNA-sequence assembly.