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Modern biology has become a science of information, analysis and prediction, coalescing into computational biology -- a single discipline at the crossroads of life sciences, informatics, and mathematics. New developments in information and communications technology as well as high-performance computing enable researchers to address new demanding scientific problems which seemed far out of reach only a few years ago. The computational requirements of most applications in computational biology differ significantly from the requirements of other users of highthroughput computing such as high energy physics. To address these needs, the SwissBioGrid initiative, a collaboration among several partner institutions with a broad spectrum of expertise, was started over a year ago. In this paper, we report on its current status and achievements as well as the lessons learned which are of interest to the wider e …