Dr James Bouwer1
1University Of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
Introduction:
Single particle cryogenic electron microscopy (CryoEM) represents one of the most data intensive big data production techniques in the science at the moment. Typical data outputs range from 2-8 TBytes per day per instrument and growing. These machines typically run 24/7. These extremely large data sets are processed on the back end by high-performance-compute resources to produce atomic resolution maps of large protein complexes. Ultimately, these atomic resolution maps, which consist of 100’s of thousands of atoms per protein structure provide insight into the biological processes that make life possible. Many of these protein structures are targets for drug discovery by pharmaceutical companies.
Methods:
Here we describe a customer-centric approach to building customer workflows to manage the data, provide access, and allow for HPC compute to our customers from across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
Results
At present the University of Wollongong CryoEM facility provides access to over 100 customers from across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. In this talk we’ll describe the overall architecture and approach to seamlessly integrating CryoEM workflows and big data with our customer’s needs.
Conclusion:
With properly designed architecture, a seamless workflow can be built to move data from instruments into storage, across high-speed networks to HPC resources, producing high-resolution structures with supporting visualization and modelling to customers in order to provide new insight into biology and drug research.
Biography:
James Bouwer received his PhD in Physics from the University of California, San Diego under Mark Ellisman in 2002 working on quantum dots. James worked as a Principal Development Engineer where where designed and build a wide variety of new instrumentation around light, electron, and x-ray microscopes. James was the lead engineer in the development of some of the world’s first direct detection devices for transmission electron microscopes. James later moved into managing UCSDs CryoEM facility under Tim Baker, Elizabeth Villa, and Andreas Leschziner. James is currently the Director of Molecular Horizons Cryogenic Electron Microscopy Facility at the University of Wollongong, just south of Sydney, which serves researchers across Australia, New Zealand, South-East Asia, and the United States.