PBS Professional at Toulouse Genopole: Accelerating Genomics Research

The Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées Genopole, a research program established in 1999 in southern France, was facing a significant challenge. The program, which is part of the National Genopole Network, was dealing with an increasing number of complete genome sequences that required more processors and intensive utilization. The initial compute platform for bioinformatics at the Toulouse Genopole was a four-processor Dell server, later supplemented by a four-CPU IBM system. However, these resources were insufficient for the ambitious bioinformatics program and the researchers developing bioinformatics tools in three Genopole-connected laboratories. The demand for computational resources was steadily increasing, and the existing infrastructure was unable to keep up.

The Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées Genopole is a research program set up in 1999 in southern France as part of the National Genopole Network. The initiative has drawn together a mix of public laboratories, biotech companies, and educational institutions at seven locations across France. The Toulouse Genopole comprises thirty academic laboratories, with some 3,000 researchers working in five basic fields: Microbiology, plants and animals, health, ethics, and bioinformatics. The Genopole’s bioinformatics resources are hosted by the Toulouse INRA (National Agronomic Research Institute) computing center. The Genopole serves four kinds of users: Biologists who access bioinformatics tools through the platform’s open website, UNIX-literate biologists who run bioinformatics tools in console mode, software engineers developing new interfaces and workflow systems for large-scale genomics or bioinformatics programs, and scientists developing new algorithms and methodologies for gene detection, comparative genomics, microarray analysis, sequence searches and other fields.