Switzerland switches on supercomputers

Last month, a supercomputing centre devoted solely to bioinformatics came online in Switzerland. Based at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in Lausanne, Vital-IT can process 450 billion calculations per second and should provide a welcome boost to the country's proteomics capabilities.

As well as raising Switzerland's profile in the world of bioinformatics, Vital-IT will create several research jobs and will help to foster innovation. The centre is a collaboration between the bioinformatics institute, the computing firms Hewlett Packard and Intel, and five other academic institutions: the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, and the universities of Lausanne, Geneva and Basel. All of the partners will benefit from having access to the new facility. The EPFL, for example, is setting up two research groups in bioinformatics that will be committed to the centre.

The Swiss government this year doubled the budget of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics to SFr6 million (US$4.6 million) a year starting in 2004; the institute will have received a total of SFr27 million by 2007. About half of that money will go towards paying for protein annotation, the labour-intensive process of determining each protein's function and classifying them by family. The budget hike has allowed Vital-IT to hire five staff this year and may provide for more positions next year, says Victor Jongeneel, the centre's director.

Hewlett Packard and Intel got involved in Vital-IT primarily as a means of testing new technologies and as a way to get into the potentially lucrative bioinformatics market. Their efforts seem to be paying off: the centre is already attracting talented computer scientists to tweak old bioinformatics software to run on the new hardware (see Nature Biotechnol. 22, 492–493; 2004). The two companies, which are funding one position each at the centre, are also building their own in-house bioinformatics teams, says Jongeneel, who adds that all academic partners in the project intend to grow their research capacity over the next few years.

But, perhaps most importantly, the launch of the centre should attract more collaborators who are interested in applying new computational techniques to protein analysis.

→ http://www.isb-sib.ch/projects/vitalit.htm