Scientific code is never fast enough. We need the results of that simulation before that pressing deadline, or that meeting with our advisor. Computational resources are scarce, and competition for a spot in the computing nodes (cough, cough) can be tiresome. We need to squeeze every ounce of performance. And we need to do it with as little effort as possible.
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Considering Containers? – Go for Singularity
Docker is an excellent containerisation system ideally suited to production servers. It allows you to do one small thing but do it well. For example, breaking a large blog up into individually maintained containers for a web-server, a database and (say) a wordpress instance. However due to inherent security woes, Docker doesn’t play nicely with multi-tenanted machines, the kind which are the bread and butter for researchers and HPC users. That’s where Singularity steps in.
Continue readingSAbBox – the easy way to obtain our antibody tools
A significant part of the work we do here in OPIG revolves around antibodies, the proteins of the immune system that bind to and help remove any foreign entities that find their way into the body. Since antibodies can be developed that target basically anything, they have become extremely useful as therapeutics. In our research, we develop computational tools that can be incorporated into various points along the antibody discovery pipeline. These tools include our database of antibody structures, SAbDab, and a series of predictive tools (e.g. structural modelling algorithms like ABodyBuilder) which are known collectively as SAbPred.
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