The TUM School of Life Sciences in Weihenstephan brings diverse research areas together under the vision of One Health. A common theme across all its research domains is that high-throughput and high-resolution technologies have become ubiquitous, generating massive amounts of data that need to be analyzed.
Artificial intelligence requires much higher computation power
Moreover, the School now faces unprecedented opportunities to leverage these data through artificial intelligence. Consequently, the demand for computing power to process and analyze these data, as well as to train and use the next generation of AI models in the life sciences, has also increased dramatically.
To address this need, the DFG is supporting researchers at the TUM School of Life Sciences with €900,000 to set up a new € 1.8 million high-performance computing cluster, hosted and supported by the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ).
“Life Science Compute Cluster” for shared use
The Life Science Compute Cluster will enable seamless resource sharing for the 15 participating research groups and the entire campus. This means faster runtimes, balanced workloads during peak periods, and access to cutting-edge compute power from CPUs to GPUs for everyone – from undergraduates to PhD students and postdocs.
Markus List (Vice Dean for Information Management), who coordinated this application under DFG’s major instrumentation funding scheme, says: „The Life Science Compute Cluster allows us to move away from a situation where most research groups rely on local hardware that is limited in capacity and difficult to maintain, towards cutting-edge compute hardware, where the support of the LRZ allows us to dedicate more of our precious time to research. The ability to share resources and to collaborate also means that we can now tackle more challenging problems in data science and AI, allowing us to stay at the forefront of life science research."