Below are example grant "Facilities and Resources" sections for BRCF PODs, TACC, and the Bioinformatics Consulting Group. Wording that should be changed on a per-lab basis is marked in bold italics.
Local computational and storage infrastructure
Local research computing resources consist of <your number of compute servers> computational servers connected to a high-capacity shared storage server. [See this page for a list of servers on your POD and their configurations: POD Resources and Access#AvailablePODs]. The compute servers are <for example:
All <name of your group> data, including raw and processed data from NGS experiments, user and administrative data, databases and local backups, is hosted locally at a data center administered by the Biomedical Research and Computing Facility (BRCF), on a 24-disk storage server (144 TB capacity, ~75 TB usable) providing ZFS file services. Our local compute servers described above communicate with this file server over 10 gigabit Ethernet, providing fast local storage for I/O intensive operations. Automated nightly local backups and weekly off-site backup processes are in place, the latter to a shared offsite backup server (192 TB capacity, ~120 TB usable) hosted at the UT Austin data center.
Texas Advanced Computing Center
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin is one of the leading centers of computational excellence in the United States. The center provides access to high-performance computing, data visualization, and storage resources that are critical for bandwidth-intensive computational research. Available resources include Lonestar5, with 1,252 Cray XC40 dual-CPU 24-core, 64G RAM compute nodes, and Stampede2, a hybrid cluster with 4,200 Knights Landing nodes (68 4-hyperthread cores, 96G RAM) and 1,736 Skylake nodes (24 2-hyperthread cores, 192G RAM). All TACC compute clusters have access to Stockyard, a global 20 petabyte high-performance Lustre parallel file system, along with cluster-local multi-PB scratch file systems for computation I/O. These compute resources provide an extensive suite of software for bioinformatics and computational biology, including R/Bioconductor, Python, a variety of NGS aligners (Bowtie, BWA, STAR, HiSat2, kallisto, etc.) and ancillary software including bedtools, cufflinks, GATK, and more. TACC also provides storage for research data collections at Corral, a 6 petabyte online disk storage system, and at Ranch, a 100 petabyte magnetic tape archive. Also available for visualization of biological data are the resources of the 2900 sq. ft. Advanced Scientific Visualization Laboratory, which includes a 360 degree, wrap-around projection system for 3D stereo viewing, an editing suite, and the help of the visualization center staff. More information can be found at www.tacc.utexas.edu.
The <name of your group> has currently been granted a <your number of Stampede2 SUs> node-hour allocation on Stampede2, a <your number of Lonestar5 SUs> node-hour allocation on Lonestar5, and a <probably 5 TB> storage allocation on Corral.
Bioinformatics Consulting Group
The Bioinformatics Consulting Group (BCG) is part of the Center for Biomedical Research Support (CBRS) at UT Austin and provides support for students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty interested in the use of computational approaches to solving biological problems. The BCG provides assistance and computational biology and bioinformatics services ranging from consultations and running standard computational pipelines for a set service fee, to customized pipeline development and analysis in collaboration with researchers. BCG researchers are experienced in many areas of bioinformatics and NGS analysis, including data from multiple NGS platforms, de novo genome assembly, transcriptome assembly, various alignment algorithms, annotations, RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, scRNA-seq, exome analysis, R, Bioconductor, Python, databases, statistical and machine learning algorithms, classification and regression modeling, pathway analysis, motif analysis, and more.