New Installation of equipment for computing using graphics cards for the treatment of electronic microscopy and biocomputation images.

The Molecular Biology Institute of Barcelona(IBMB-CSIC) has carried out a scientific-technological equipment project that has significantly improved the capacity for calculating, processing images and managing/storing/accessing large volumes of data.

The increase of these capacities by the IBMB is decisive for the four departments that compose it to obtain a significant improvement in terms of the scope of work and the competitiveness of the investigation. The different users who require it will have access to a queuing system to send the different tasks to the corresponding servers.

The treatment of images in the IBMB covers two differentiated areas: (Cryo) -Electronic Microscopy (also Cryo-Tomography of Electron Microscopy) and various Optical Microscopies. Each of the imaging projects, particularly those related to Electron Microscopy, have to process significant volumes of data that can easily exceed ten Terabytes.

According to the information we have, in the scientific environment of Barcelona and, almost certainly, of the whole of Catalonia, there is no computer equipment explicitly dedicated to the processing of electron microscopy images. Given the impact that the “Resolution Revolution” is having explosively worldwide, we believe that it is important and it can have a great social and academic effect to implement this type of computer equipment at the IBMB.

The new cluster of computers to perform calculations using processors and graphics cards