ScalaLife: Scalable Software Services for Life Science

Life Science is developing into one of the largest e- Infrastructure users in Europe, in part due to the ever-growing amount of biological data. Modern drug design typically includes both sequence bioinformatics, in silico virtual screening, and free energy calculations, e.g. of drug binding. This development will accelerate tremendously, and puts high demands on simulation software and support services. e-Infrastructure projects such as PRACE/DEISA have made important advances on hardware and scalability, but have largely been focused on theoretical scalability for large systems, while typical life science applications rather concern small-to-medium size molecules. ScalaLife will focus on implementing new techniques for efficient small-system parallelization combined with throughput and ensemble computing to enable the life science community to exploit the European e-Infrastructures efficiently. We will seek to establish a new approach for targeting the entire pipeline from problem formulation through algorithms, simulations, and analysis by focusing heavily on actual application problems. In particular, ScalaLife will provide both the long-term support for major European software by establishing a pilot for a long-term Competence Centre for scalable software services for the Life Science community to foster Europe’s role as a major software provider.

Beginning of project: September 1, 2010
End of project: August 31, 2013

Contact person

Dr. Ferdinand Jamitzky; Dr. Momme Allalen

Funding scheme: EU - FP7-Infrastructures-2011-2
Project number: 283543

Website: http://www.scalalife.eu