Summary: It takes a supercomputer to grow a better soybean. A project called the Soybean Knowledge Base, or SoyKB for short, wants to do just that. Scientists at the University of Missouri-Columbia developed SoyKB. They say they've made SoyKB a publicly-available web resource for all soybean data, from molecular data to field data that includes several analytical tools. SoyKB has grown to be used by thousands of soybean researchers in the U.S. and beyond. They did it with the support of XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, funded by the National Science Foundation. The SoyKB team needed XSEDE resources to sequence and analyze the genomes of over a thousand soybean lines using about 370,000 core hours on the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. They're since moved that work from Stampede to Wrangler, TACC's newest data-intensive system. And they're getting more users onboard with an allocation on XSEDE's Jetstream, a fully configurable cloud environment for science. Host Jorge Salazar interviews Trupti Joshi and Dong Xu of the University of Missouri-Columbia; and Mats Rynge of the University of Southern California.
