ISU began developing bioinformatics over the past 2 years. It started with the formation of the Iowa Computational Biology Lab - a group of faculty from a variety of depts who began meeting once a week in a seminar, journal club format. Things really gained a footing with the addition of three new hires last year (including Volker Brendel from Stanford). We have an ongoing search for an additional bioinformaticist this year.
To coordinate genomics and bioinformatics efforts, a group of faculty (at the administration's request) formed the Iowa Genome Frontiers Lab. Briefly, it is an integrated set of research facilities, including microarray, high throughput sequencing, proteomics, robotics and comp. bio components. The administration has kicked in about $600K so far, and we anticipate another 400K over the coming year (some of this is detailed in the budget).
Specifically in the area of comp.bio, the University has funded renovation of space for a comp. lab (65K), and they contributed toward a 16-node parallel computing system that Volker is developing ( 100K, I believe). They have also made substantial contributions as matching funds to various proposals. For example, we have a training grant into NSF for which they've provided $200K over 5 yrs for equipment as well as salary money for a systems analyst.