Zanetti Lab

Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia

CRS4, the Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia, founded in 1990, is one of the leading centers in Italy for research and development activities based on information technology, bioinformatics, high performance computing (HPC) and networking. CRS4's research activities focus on the development of enabling technologies in physical modelling, mathematical modeling and computer science in high priority areas recognized as strategic at the regional, national and European levels. Current computational resources include hundred-Teraflop conventional and hybrid (CPU/GPU) HPC clusters as well as multi-Petabyte storage systems. The center is connected at very high speed (multiple 10Gb Ethernet lambdas) to the regional and national research networks. CRS4 helps bridging the gap between biology and computation by hosting a high throughput genotyping and sequencing facility that is directly connected to the center's computational resources.

CRS4's computational skills and resources fuel several projects developed in cooperation with leading research institutions in the biosciences, most notably CNR-IRGB, in the context of two large scale studies on autoimmune diseases and longevity. The center supports large scale genome-wide association studies with the development of scalable tools such as SEAL; develops semantic-aware applications that help connect to clinical data systems based on HL7 and international standards for clinical data description such as OpenEHR; researches enabling cloud computing technologies, especially at the PaaS (Platform as a Service) level.

CRS4's activities as an OMERO satellite include the development of HPC tools that integrate with OMERO's API and a scripting system that provides users with the computational power needed for massive data processing tasks, such as whole genome resequencing, high-throughput genotyping and compression of large images in digital pathology. These activities leverage CRS4's experience with distributed data-intensive applications based on Hadoop and multi-GPU multi-core architectures.

Further information is available on the CRS4 website

Gianluigi Zanetti holds a degree in Physics from the University of Bologna (1984) and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago (1988). Before joining CRS4, he has conducted research and teaching activities at Princeton University, Los Alamos National Lab, École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and other institutions. Currently, Gianluigi is the director of the Data Fusion sector and of the Distributed Computing program at CRS4. His research interests focus on the scaling behavior of virtual cluster technologies for HPC and their application to data-intensive problems in the biosciences.

Gianmauro Cuccuru received the M.Sc. degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Cagliari, Italy, in 2006. Before joining CRS4 in 2009, he has worked on 3D laser scanning, web development, and large scale database design and administration. Currently, Gianmauro is involved in the development and administration of bioinformatics resources at CRS4, focusing on GPU solutions for large scale biological simulations and on the integration of clinical and experimental data from genome-wide studies.

Luca Lianas received his degree in computer science from the University of Cagliari, Italy. He joined CRS4 in 2006. Since then, he's been working on various research projects that involve the application of information technologies to the clinical and biomedical sectors. Noteworthy examples include the prototype of a telemedicine system developed in collaboration with the department of pediatric cardiology at the Brotzu hospital. Luca is currently involved in the development and administration of a data warehousing system for clinical and genomic data related to large scale association studies.