A phylogenetic analysis can take a long time to run, but there are ways to do it more efficiently and effectively. The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) will co-host a tutorial Oct. 13-15 focusing on high performance computing (HPC) for phylogenetics.

"Fast, Free Phylogenies: HPC for Phylogenetics" focuses on how to use TeraGrid, the CIPRES Portal, the iPlant Discovery environment, university clusters, and other typically free HPC resources for phylogenetic analysis. The tutorial is geared primarily toward biologists, including students, postdocs and faculty, who are at least moderately experienced with phylogenetic analysis and who have datasets to run but who are typically running analyses on their own desktops, but the material is also appropriate for researchers, such as statisticians or mathematicians working in phylogenetics, as well as researchers working as a team, such as a pairing of a biologist and a statistician who collaborate in their work.

A webinar and self-paced online resources basic unix usage will also be offered prior to the workshop, which will be held at NIMBioS on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus.

Tutorial instructors and organizers include Eric Carr (NIMBioS); Jim Ferguson (National Institute for Computational Sciences, Univ. of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory); Susan Holmes (Stanford Univ.); Brian O'Meara (Univ. Tennessee); Alexis Stamatakis (Technical Univ. of Munich); Dan Stanzione (Texas Advanced Computing Center/iPlant); Bob Thomson (Univ. California Davis); and James Wilgenbusch (Florida State Univ.).

Other hosts for the tutorial are iPlant, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Institute for Computational Sciences.