In getting to understand more on some of the current activities by the Infrastructure Working Group, the term “Birds of a Feather” (BoF) struck my attention. I wondered, “What exactly is a BoF?” Simply defined, I gathered that a BoF is a meeting or a gathering of people who share a common interest in a specific topic with the intention to solve a problem. Supercomputing services which are ‘the use of aggregated computing power to solve advanced computational problems related to scientific research’ face a number of problems in bioinformatics.
Speaking with Peter van Heusden, some of their Working Group members host BoF sessions with researchers and scientists all around the world to address some of these problems. To improve supercomputing services, high-performance computing (HPC) and the cloud is one dimension of optimizing efficiency, usability and accessibility in supercomputing services. “There has been somewhat of a blurring between HPC and the cloud: both use large numbers of computing servers configured in datacenters that are accessed over the network,” Van Heusden said “BoF sessions with researchers and scientists all around the world may improve the use of HPC and the cloud in genomic sequencing (especially for) viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 that require larger storage and new visualization methods. Furthermore, the use of improved systems will support the organization and collection of accurate data (particularly for) public health labs.”
Be on the lookout for one of these gatherings this mid- November with Tom Connor during the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis.
Siyamthanda Majeke, PHA4GE
