Intellectual Merit: This award to Indiana University (IU) is to establish the National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS) in partnership with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The NCGAS will be an innovative service center (core facility) that supports the national community of NSF-funded researchers who use genome assembly software, particularly software suitable for assembly of data from next-generation sequencers; large-scale phylogenetic software; and other genome analysis software requiring large amounts of memory. This center will be a general source of software support and services that will be provided on the Mason large memory computer cluster at IU, on the TACC Gordon system, and on the San Diego Supercomputer Center Dash system. The NCGAS will provide services such as use of cluster-based genome analysis software, storage of submitted data sets, and a repository of open source genome analysis software. Services will particularly support analyses of next-generation sequencer output for de novo assembly, metagenomic projects, and resequencing.
Broader Impacts: The NCGAS will develop innovative solutions to current needs in genome assembly and analysis. It will establish a core of experts and software tools to support research on a variety of nationally funded cyberinfrastructure systems, and will add to the suite of available systems a large memory cluster ideal for this work. By developing a community of investigators and technologists and exploring new modalities of provisioning computational resources, such as "on demand" computing, this project aspires to become a sustainable model for the ongoing, and increasing, need for sequence analysis. The NCGAS website provides up-to-date information at http://pti.iu.edu/ncgas/.
