I once started studying physics with the clear aim of getting into astrophysics but as I was always very interested in programming I started to study computer science in parallel to physics. While additionally starting way too many side projects, like doing applied Machine Learning projects at a small tech company, or the multiple occasions on which I participated in the synthetic biology competition iGEM (2014, 2015, 2019), might not have helped with getting through university in the usual straightforward way I wouldn’t have wanted to miss these experiences. Especially without iGEM I wouldn’t have started to get interested in bioinformatics and computational biology. Nowadays I am doing my PhD at the computational biology and simulation group at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where I am also currently employed as HPC Systemmanager at the local supercomputer.
While I initially wanted to work on optimization heuristics and their analysis using methods from
statistical physics, with these problems from biology only involved as annoying applications,
I must say that said applications did grow on me. And now I am using software like Rosetta or GROMACS a lot. As projects in computational biology are usually quite hungry for computational resources it is a very good thing that we have one of the Top100 (November 2020) supercomputers at our university.
In this Blog I want to write about practical problems that I encountered during my research and work a the cluster. The only reason I thought this was a good idea is basically that for some of these applications, like doing projects with Rosetta, it appears to me like there aren’t that many recent reports or accounts on how to use it around.
I might also use this blog, as many others do, as a dumping ground for notes on how do stuff ^^.
Feel free to contact me via one of the following social media accounts where you can also find me.
Find me on other Platforms