Vital-IT is an innovative life science informatics initiative providing computational resources, consultancy and training to connect fundamental and applied research. It is a collaboration between the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), Hewlett Packard Company, Intel Corporation and Oracle. This small but important development team has successful ported and optimized over 50 life science applications using the Intel Linux compiler and other software tools.