Melbourne Bioinformatics
Melbourne Bioinformatics is a centre for computational life science expertise. It provides bioinformatics support for all researchers and students in a wide range of projects and services of local and national significance. Researchers can engage with Melbourne Bioinformatics through training and consulting with experts which can lead to project collaborations with academic staff within the University of Melbourne.
History
The VLSCI was established as part of the Victorian government's plans to support biotechnology, and was listed as a key infrastructure project in the Victorian Biotechnology Action Plan 2011. It was a $100m initiative of the Victorian Government in partnership with The University of Melbourne and the IBM Life Sciences Research Collaboratory, Melbourne. Other major stakeholders included key Victorian health and medical research institutions, major universities and public research organisations.In 2015 the VLSCI transitioned to a new governance model after receiving a further $6.65m from the Victorian State Government. The first IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences was co-located at VLSCI for 5 years. Since moving to the nearby offices of IBM Research Australia, Collaboratory staff have continued to work on a range of projects as part of a broader University of Melbourne/IBM partnership under the new name of Melbourne Bioinformatics.
Melbourne Bioinformatics's petascale high performance computation facility was accessible to researchers in Victoria by operating across various universities and research institutes in Melbourne. The clusters were in the top 500 worldwide in 2017. Technical experts were on staff to maximise the user experience, meet the skills gaps in research teams, build the necessary cross-disciplinary research collaborations, and provide skills to scale up projects to efficiently use the processing power being delivered. Ongoing skills development and training was provided in computational biology, molecular modelling and bioinformatics.