NCSA

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has announced the creation of the Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA), a new center that brings together agricultural producers, researchers, and industries to innovate on the technology that is transforming agriculture to feed and support a growing global population. The center, which will launch today at the Center for Digital Agriculture Industry Conference, seeks to develop digital solutions to agricultural roadblocks.

HPCBio and NCSA changing genetic medicine in Africa

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in collaboration with the HPCBio group led by Director of Bioinformatics Victor Jongeneel is helping change the way genetic medicine is researched and practiced in Africa.

Many of our most widespread diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental illness, are associated with variants in our genes. How do these variants in our genomes carry across generations, and how do they ultimately affect our health? University of Illinois researchers are trying to unlock the mystery.

IGB Faculty Members Granted Access to Top Supercomputer

Four researchers at the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) have been granted access to the Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, capable of sustained performance at 1 petaflop, the measure of computer processing speed that is equal to a thousand trillion floating-point operations per second.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has gifted the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) a highly parallel shared memory supercomputer named Ember. Originally funded by the NSF, Ember will be managed by the High-Performance Biological Computing (HPCBio) group.

“We’ve been using Ember for a while now through the NCSA, mainly in computational genomics,” said Victor Jongeneel, Director of HPCBio. “It can perform a lot of tasks that our existing systems just can’t. Having it under our own management will allow us better access and faster results.”