2016/09/22

Assembly of large, salty and fat viruses: when a bit of grease helps

The Structural Virology group led by Nicola Abrescia attended and contributed to the 10^th user’s conference of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (Red Española de Supercomputacion-RES) which was held in Leon (Spain) on the 20^th and 21^st:

http://www.bsc.es/marenostrum-support-services/hpc-education-and-training/res-trainings-seminars/res-users-meetings-2016

http://www.leonoticias.com/leon/201609/20/centro-supercomputacion-leon-clave-20160920120447.html

The RES is part of the Spanish ICTS (Infraestructuras Cientifico-Tecnologicas Singulares) and offers competitively supercomputing time to ambitious projects that escapes to standard computing infrastructure (http://www.bsc.es/marenostrum-support-services/res).

Within the Life and Health session, the talk by Abrescia on the ‘Assembly of large, salty and fat viruses: when a bit of grease helps’ highlighted how recent advances in high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy impose enormous technical challenges, including extremely demanding requirements in RAM memory with specific computing architectures for image processing of very large viruses (about 800 Ang in diameter). These requirements and the success of the project has been tightly linked to the access of the supercomputing Picasso infrastructure at the University of Malaga, also part of the RES network.

Abrescia’s contribution has shown how the so-called cryo-EM revolution can only be achieved by a democratization of infrastructures, which not only involves the access to high-end electron microscopes, but also to supercomputing facilities, in challenging projects. In this latter case, RES bears witness to a successfull reality in Spain.