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PETE JOKINEN
back-up solution is using traditional tape-based methods.
SNS: Are you able to benchmark and share knowledge with other high performance/ supercomputer areas?
PJ: We collaborate mostly with life science organizations.
SNS: Could you give some comparison as to the shrinking time windows over the years in terms of the net effect from research projects?
PJ: The Human Genome Mapping Project was an international collaboration that took almost 10 years to sequence 1 entire human genome. Now the same task can be accomplished in one week by one single sequencing machine. EBI has had to deal with this increase in raw data storage and this new time scale.
SNS: Do you have any specific objectives for the coming year?
PJ: During 2010 our objective is to move all of our external services to our two new active-redundant Data Centres in London.
SNS: We’ve not mentioned the ‘thorny’ issue of power - do you have any power or associated cooling issues?
PJ: On the campus we do have an issue with power and that is one of the main reasons why we are moving to external Data Centres.
SNS : ‘Can you tell us about your approach to working with a wide variety of vendors and other third parties?
PJ: Due to the nature of having to meet the requirements of effective, robust and flexible data handling, we use multiple solutions from different vendors to find the optimal working solutions for the EBI.
Vendor-independent services, such as the S3 Reseller
Channel, act as a gateway to many of these solutions and provide additional expertise to help us identify the best storage implementations.
SNS: Is there any such thing as a typical day?
PJ: The most interesting part of my role is that no two days are the same.
Conclusion Pete provides a fascinating insight into the challenges he faces to ensure that the EBI’s IT infrastructure keeps pace with rapidly expanding data volumes and types in order to support the institute’s activities in providing freely accessible, comprehensive and integrated biological data resources to scientists worldwide.
The table of year/CPU cores and TBs gives the starkest illustration of just how data loaded organizations are becoming in the digital age.
The Human Genome Mapping Project was an international collaboration that took almost 10 years to sequence 1 entire human genome. Now the same task can be accomplished in one week by one single sequencing machine. EBI has had to deal with this increase in raw data storage and this new time scale.
Pete Jokinen, Head of IT at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the UK
WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM SUMMER 10
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