Science Outreach Servers is a small network of high-performance workstations equipped with multi-core CPUs and GPUs dedicated to the pursuit of providing computing resources for students and researchers studying life science, theoretical chemistry, theoretical biophysics, and machine learning in a low- or lower-income country.
Even though the Internet provides many educational resources, countless students and early-career scientists are faced with the impossible task of producing real-world research without high-performance computers. Scientists in wealthy Western countries are fortunate to have substantial national data centres, university-managed supercomputers, and departmental clusters. However, countries like Nepal and Bangladesh struggle to provide essential computing resources such as laptops. Science Outreach Servers attempts to bridge this gap, bringing equality to the computational sciences where it can.
The aim is simple:
Enable eligible students and researchers, via remote login, to run computationally intense calculations such as Molecular Dynamics simulations of protein and lipid systems, Machine Learning in cheminformatics space, and genomics in bioinformatics (and a lot more).
Resources
Science Outreach Servers is a network of high-performance desktop workstations. Although few in number, we are looking at all opportunities to expand the number of machines. Anthony Nash created and managed the network, a UK-based scientist with over twelve years of experience in scientific research and more than fifteen years of experience in software and system development. The workstations that are currently available are:
- Intel i9 36 core, NVIDIA GTX Quadro 4000, 128 GB RAM
- Intel Xeon E5 32 core, x2 NVIDIA GTX 970, 64 GB RAM
- Intel Xeon E5 32 core, NVIDIA GTX 2080, 64 GB RAMA
- MD 6 core, NVIDIA GTX 1070, 32 GB RAM
- NAS Server with 6TB of storage space
We currently support the following software and packages:
- Gromacs
- AmberTools21
- Python and R
- Bioconductor
- RDKit
- ORC
We hope to support a ligand-docking high throughput screening software package soon.