HPC NEWS
Beijing Genomics Institute deploys 1 petabyte storage for DNA sequencing
The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) at Shenzhen has deployed more than one petabyte (PB) of Isilon Systems’ scale-out NAS to power its DNA sequencing environments. Working with one of China’s leading IT integrators, United Electronics, BGI is using Isilon’s X-Series, featuring its OneFS operating system, to unify more than 100 Illumina genome analysers onto a single, high-performance, highly scalable, shared pool
of storage. With Isilon IQ, BGI has achieved previously unattainable levels of data performance for its research team, increasing productivity across a large array of initiatives to accelerate time-to-discovery, while reducing capital and operating expenses. ‘The phrase “high performance” doesn’t even begin to describe the rigid computing and data storage demands of BGI’s DNA sequencing environment,
as its sheer size is beyond the capabilities of nearly all storage systems, traditional or otherwise,’ said Donghui Wang, chairman, United Electronics. ‘However, Isilon was up to the task. With Isilon IQ, BGI has attained unprecedented levels of both concurrent and sequential I/O performance, while saving significant man hours and capital investment, creating immeasurable value for its operations.’
French HPC organisation increases
compute power for research
The French national high performance computing organisation, Grand
Equipement National de Calcul Intensif (GENCI), is expanding France’s compute and storage capabilities with SGI supercomputing solutions. The organisation’s new SGI Altix ICE installation called Jade is located at France’s National Computer Center for Higher Education (CINES). It is being used by researchers in diverse scientific disciplines, including climatology and sustainable development, space and
News in brief
l An energy-saving approach to cooling Argonne’s Blue Gene/P supercomputer has been recognised with an Environmental Sustainability (EStar) award from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science.
l Caps Entreprise, a French developer of programming tools for ‘manycore’ systems, has announced that it is expanding into Asia and the Pacific regions by opening a new office in Shanghai, China.
l Spectra Logic has opened its new worldwide headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. The facility contains a 1,500 square foot executive briefing room and the Spectra Technology Center.
aeronautical research, energy exploration, industrial research, and life and materials sciences. ‘This SGI Altix ICE deployment is essential technology that underpins our strategy to implement the computing infrastructures needed to assist the development of scientific research throughout Europe,’ said Catherine Rivière, president of GENCI. ‘It is testimony to the importance of HPC for accelerating innovation and strengthening global competitiveness.’
The supercomputer connects to Renater, the French high-speed network, and to European community infrastructures to provide quick and expanded access to data that scientists and engineers need to accelerate results throughout French and European research ecosystems. With 2,688 quad- core Intel Xeon processors, for a total of 10,752 cores, and 48TB of system memory, Altix ICE delivers up to 120 teraflops and features almost 50TB of distributed memory.
HPC platform installed as part of computer architecture research
Eurotech and the AuroraScience Collaboration have agreed to install an Aurora AU-5600 HPC platform as part of a planned Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Science (LISC), operated jointly by the Bruno Kessler Fundation (FBK) and the University of Trento. AuroraScience is a
research project in the field of computational sciences and computer architecture. ‘AuroraScience merges the know-how of many partners. The goal is not only HPC hardware and architecture development, but also exploiting computing power efficiently in a variety of research areas, including lattice gauge theory,
computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, protein folding, genomics and medical physics,’ said Professor Achim Richter, director of the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas (ECT*) and representative of FBK for AuroraScience. ‘Designing, tuning and porting activities in the petascale age require a global approach, where competence is drawn from different sources.’ The Aurora Au-5600
machine will deliver in its first phase 20 teraflops and will use the latest 32nm Intel Xeon 5600 series processors. Thanks to Aurora liquid cooling, the installation will be also one of the greenest HPC facilities: waste heat will be available to provide heating services to the data centre, drastically reducing running costs and environmental impact.
www.scientific-computing.com
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD JUNE/JULY 2010
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