Collaboration gets the most out of software

Abstract

By centralizing many of the tasks associated with the upkeep of scientific software, SBGrid allows researchers to spend more of their time on research.

Keywords: Cutting edge; computational tools and techniques; research computing; software.

Figure 1.

Worldwide distribution of SBGrid member laboratories as of May 2013. The SBGrid software library spans the spectrum of techniques commonly utilized by structural biologists, including X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, NMR, 2D crystallography, bioinformatics, computational chemistry, small angle scattering, tomography, modelling, visualization and structure prediction.

Figure 2.

Schematic representations of the interactions between developers, end-users and institutions. (Left) By providing software and support (orange lines) to end-users and institutions, SBGrid frees up time for developers to have scientific interactions (blue lines) with the scientific community, and reduces the amount of time end-users and institutions need to spend updating and maintaining software, thus leaving more time for research. SBGrid also facilitates access to external computing resources (green lines). In the traditional model for supporting research computing (right), the burden of maintaining and updating software falls on developers and users (orange line), thus reducing the time available for other more productive activities (blue line). Moreover, access to the most powerful external computing resources is limited to a small number of computationally sophisticated end-users (dashed lines).