astronomy

Melbourne Bioinformatics

Melbourne Bioinformatics is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Melbourne Bioinformatics rather than just read about it. In short: Melbourne Bioinformatics (formerly the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, VLSCI) 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.

Key takeaways

Melbourne Bioinformatics belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Melbourne Bioinformatics to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Melbourne Bioinformatics from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Melbourne Bioinformatics (formerly the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, VLSCI) 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.

The Computers At its peak, the VLSCI's Peak Computing Facility operated at 855 teraflops. The systems included 'Barcoo', an IBM iDataPlex x86, 'Merri', an IBM iDataPlex x86 and 'Avoca', comprising 4 racks of IBM Blue Gene/Q.

Peak Computing Facility The VLSCI Peak Computing Facility (PCF) provided high-performance compute infrastructure and computational expertise to Life Sciences researchers across Victoria. The PCF had tightly-coupled clusters with very fast disk subsystems, currently operating at a peak capacity of 855 teraflops. To help researchers maximize their use of compute time and get the most out of their allocated resources, the PCF had a team of system administrators, programmers and application specialists accessible through its help request system.

Life Sciences Computation Centre The VLSCI Life Science Computation Centre (LSCC) was physically housed at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University, and with many staff working at various research institutes including The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) for some portion of their week. The LSCC was a distributed pool of expertise and infrastructure for computational life science research, servicing life science research institutions across Victoria. It aimed to foster research collaboration and support to a relatively small number of specific external projects; act as a source of common resources, software platforms and expertise to support life science researchers; offer research training, education, and career development for bioinformaticians and computational biologists, to support the advancement of the Victorian computational life sciences research community; and support the advancement of life science computation as a whole in Victoria.

Galaxy Australia Melbourne Bioinformatics together with QFAB Bioinformatics, QCIF and the University of Queensland’s Research Computing Centre jointly built and operate Galaxy Australia which is a major feature of the Genomics Virtual Laboratory.

See also National Computational Infrastructure

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Melbourne Bioinformatics

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Melbourne Bioinformatics claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Melbourne Bioinformatics before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Melbourne Bioinformatics ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Melbourne Bioinformatics

In research: Melbourne Bioinformatics appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Melbourne Bioinformatics in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Melbourne Bioinformatics is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Bioinformatics organizations, Science and technology in Melbourne, University of Melbourne, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Melbourne Bioinformatics outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Melbourne Bioinformatics in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Melbourne Bioinformatics means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Melbourne Bioinformatics out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Melbourne Bioinformatics in simple terms?

Why does Melbourne Bioinformatics matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Melbourne Bioinformatics?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Melbourne Bioinformatics.