abstract
-
This project implements a bioinformatics core facility, which provides hardware, software, educational/training capabilities, and staffing that enable biomedical researchers to analyze and model biological data.
The Core Facility includes three clusters for high performance computing. The first has 192 2.8GHz Xeon processors with 1GB of RAM per server. The second has 44 2.8GHz Xeon processors with 1GB of RAM per server. The third has 96 64-bit 2 GHz Apple Xserve G5 processors with 4 GB of RAM per server. The database server is a Sun Fire V880 with eight 750 MHz processors and 16GB RAM. There are two Dell Poweredge 6950 applications servers, each with 4 AMD64 dual-core processors and 8 GB RAM. The facility also has several midrange Sun Fire V440 and Sun Fire v480 servers, each with 2 SPARC processors and 4GB of RAM, for project-specific data and software needs.The Core supports over 15 TB of additional RAID disk space, with one robotic backup unit. All research systems are connected to each other with 2GB/s channels and to the UI backbone with 1GB/s fiber.
The faculty office and laboratory computers are provided with a1Gb/sec connection to the core and have Internet 2 access.The servers, including the cluster computers, are located on the University of Idaho campus in a 1400 square foot room that has been designed to meet the power and cooling needs of a large number of systems. Two full time staff members provide systems administration, and a Bioinformatics Coordinator provides software and sequence analysis support.This facility is being upgraded to include a new compute cluster built using Dell M1000e/M605 blade systems. The new cluster will have a total of 128 cores which will be expanded to include 512 cores by spring 2009.