History
Bioinformatics has been playing an important role at the CHU de Québec Research Center for nearly 20 years already. As early as 2001, a team of bioinformaticians was working on data analysis for ambitious genotyping projects, like the ATLAS project, which was a pioneer in using multiple ‘omics’ datasets to identify the genes influenced by steroid hormones.
In 2011, Dr Droit was recruited by the Research Center to establish a bioinformatics service and develop a local expertise on computation biology. In 2012, funded by a Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant, the bioinformatics service gradually becomes operational. Today, the bioinformatics service is composed of 4 full-time bioinformaticians and uses a state of the art infrastructure composed of 1.8 petabytes of disk servers and around 40 management and computing servers. The bioinformatics service now provides an essential support to all high-throughput research technologies as well as to the projects using those technologies.
Equipment
The Bioinformatics service has a computing infrastructure located in two distant sites: a server room at the Genomic Center of the CHU de Québec and the Colosse site at Laval University. Both sites are linked by a dedicated optic fibre connection. The Colosse site hosts 1.6PB of disk servers, whereas the Genomic Center server room hosts local computing servers and management servers as well as 0.2PB of disk servers.