CBSU Microsoft High Performance Computing

In February 2006 CBSU was chosen to become one of ten Microsoft High-Performance Computing Institutes worldwide. Being a Microsoft HPC Institute enables us to provide more bioinformatics and research support for Cornell community, CBSU also participates in testing and development of new Microsoft HPC software and system solutions like Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) . Test version of CCS running on CBSU's newest computer cluster is already linked to some of our web-based applications.

Over last several years we have developed an easy-to-use comprehensive web interface to HPC computational biology applications (cbsuapps.tc.cornell.edu). There are many applications of different kinds, parallel or serial, available there. They cover wide area of computational biology including sequence analysis, data mining, protein structure prediction, molecular dynamics, population genetics.

The interface uses Microsoft IIS on MS Windows 2003 Server as web hosting platform and is programmed in C#, it also uses MS SQL Server for data manipulation, MS   ftp server for long term data storage and MS file server for computing space. It can be linked to a HPC cluster running MS Windows 2003 Server (with Cornell Theory Center scheduler) or MS Windows CCS. This interface and its source code are available free upon request. At the present moment a new installation would require our assistance and help, we are currently working on self installing package and we expect to have initial version ready at the beginning of 2007.

Below are the links to recent articles about Microsoft HPC prepared with our input.