Background

The National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai focuses on frontier protein science and the needs of China’s biomedical and modern-agriculture industries. It builds high-throughput, high-precision, large-scale facilities for protein production and purification, structural analysis, and functional research, integrating technology and equipment at scale and with informatization. It becomes a base for protein-science research and technological innovation in China, forming a world-class, comprehensive demonstration protein-science support system and comprehensively raising China’s protein-science research capability—referred to as the protein facility.

Proteins are biological macromolecules encoded by genes and polymerized from multiple amino acids. They are the main material basis and functional executors of all life forms and life activities. Breakthroughs in protein research will fundamentally clarify mechanisms of major human diseases and provide new methods and pathways for clinical diagnosis and treatment; reveal crop growth and development patterns and provide technical reserves for breeding high-quality, high-yield varieties; and have a major impact on population health, agriculture, environmental ecology, and national security.

Project Requirements

The Shanghai facility mainly builds nine systems for protein-structure research: large-scale protein preparation; protein crystal-structure analysis; protein NMR analysis; integrated electron-microscopy analysis; protein dynamics analysis; protein modification and interaction analysis; a composite laser-microscopy system; a molecular-imaging system; and a database and computational-analysis system. Relying on the light source, it will build five beamlines and six experimental stations for three-dimensional protein-structure determination, dynamic structural-process research, and functional imaging analysis. The database and computational-analysis system must provide high-performance computing and massive storage for the whole facility.

Solution

Sugon provided the database and computational-analysis system. It serves as the protein facility’s dedicated database platform, HPC analysis platform, and national protein-facility informatization support platform, hosting centralized storage, backup, and computing of data from the core protein-research technology systems. The complete system provides a theoretical peak of 28.9 trillion double-precision floating-point operations per second on CPUs and 8.24 trillion on GPUs. The protein-science database can serve 1,000 concurrent users, and the system can provide cloud computing services externally.

Equipment-room layout of the National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai

Customer Benefits

High-performance computing and massive storage at the National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai are effectively supported. Going forward, the facility will focus on frontier protein science and the strategic needs of national population health and modern agriculture, building an open, collaborative, innovative world-class protein-science research platform, giving full play to the large-scale scientific facility and supporting China’s biomedical industry.