The computational needs of the Faculty of Natural Sciences are rapidly growing, particularly in bioinformatics research. The research of a large and growing proportion of biological labs is becoming critically dependant on high-performance computing (HPC), especially for genomic analyses. Other researchers in physics and mathematics also raised needs for HPC infrastructures.

 

The university recognized this need and allocated large funds to establish a general purpose computer cluster for the Faculty. Individual labs also contributed funds. These funds were used to contract EMET Computing, a specialist in the field. EMET's engineers designed and constructed a system to address our requirements. The key features are:

1. As many independent computing servers with as many computing cores as our money can buy (Dell PowerEdge servers, HP XL170r)

2. Fast interconnectivity allowing parallel computation (Infiniband network)

3. Large and fast central file server, suitable for genomic data and their analysis (BeeGFS distributed file system)

4. Backup of large volumes of critical data in a remote machine

5. Central management of the system, including an advanced job scheduler (SLURM)