Team members:
- Søren Brunak
- Anders Boeck Jensen
- David Westergaard
- Isa Kirk
- Christian Simon
- Lasse Folkersen
Website:
http://www.ku.dk/
Contact email:
[email protected]
University of Copenhagen, Denmark (UCPH) is the largest university in Scandinavia and ranked among the top 50 universities in the world. The Programme for Disease Systems Biology at the Centre for Protein Research (CPR) at the University of Copenhagen Medical School works as multi-disciplinary basic research groups within bioinformatics and systems biology with particular focus on large data sets of relevance to human health. The CPR has a highly multidisciplinary profile (molecular biologists, biochemists, medical doctors, physicists and computer scientists) with a ratio highly biased towards bio versus nonbio backgrounds. The centre has been formed by a grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which together with contributions from the university exceeds 150 MEuro. The Programme for Disease Systems Biology has extensive experience in working across molecular systems biology data and relevant corresponding clinical or registry data. One of the major aims is to understand temporal disease development and use patterns of comorbidities to inform work on aetiologies at the molecular level. The programme also has extensive experience in text mining, of e.g. electronic patient records, free text in biobank questionnaires, and scientific papers. CPR-UCPH will use its experience of large scale data management, disease systems biology data integration, medical informatics as well as genomics and proteomics experience. This will be used for linking molecular level data (genes, proteins, and protein complexes), to healthcare sector terminology such as ICD10 and SNOMED CT.
UCPH has access to a recently acquired Danish life science dedicated supercomputer is currently number 121 on the top500.org list (November 2014) and is built using HP’s next generation of Apollo servers designed for high throughput and contains 16,048 cores of Intel’s state of the art Haswell microarchitecture, 96TB of global DDR4 high speed memory complemented by an ultra-high speed infiniband interconnect (see further detail below). The new supercomputer supplements other machines which also are solely dedicated to life science work at CPR, making it possible to perform very demanding computations all-in-memory at very high speed. The CPR IT personnel are highly trained professionals with many years of experience in high performance hardware, computing, software development and user support in genomics, proteomics and integrative systems biology. Such close involvement of the IT staff in research and translational efforts assures short response times and higher quality of support.