'Snowy' x86 cluster takes on life sciences challenge

Researchers have a new computer system dedicated to life sciences research, based at the Victorian Government-funded Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI) and hosted at the University of Melbourne.

‘Snowy’, a Lenovo x86 cluster that operates at 30 teraflops, is now job-ready and takes VLSCI’s total x86 capacity to 50 teraflops.

To make way for Snowy, VLSCI decommissioned one of its x86 workhorses — a 7-teraflop system called Merri which had been in operation since September 2010.

“The university favoured this system over others due to the fact that it made ample use of existing technologies within the environment (eg, GPFS, xCAT, InfiniBand infrastructure), offering both a low-risk option but the very best architecture for users,” said VLSCI Director Professor Justin Zobel.

“We expect Snowy to integrate smoothly into the existing computational environment and also be sufficiently adaptable for the needs we envisage for our users in the medium term.”

Funded as part of a 2015–16 Victorian Government grant, Snowy will be used for the growing data-intensive work now dominating life science computation, such as cancer, microbial, plant and animal genomics. It has been specifically tuned to match the observed usage patterns of researchers.

VLSCI subscribers have several high-profile projects ready to move over to Snowy: the Peter Doherty Centre for Applied Microbial Genomics (working on delivering new gold standards in public health arising from new technologies in microbial genomics); the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance (playing a part in global cancer collaborations and also funded by the Victorian Government); and a partnership between Cancer Council Victoria and the University of Melbourne’s Genetic Epidemiology Laboratory (finding new subtypes of major cancers to deliver precision medicine).

“Victoria is the nation’s leader in life sciences research,” said Victorian Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade Philip Dalidakis.

“This is why we are investing in Victoria’s ICT infrastructure, ensuring there is a strong strategy in place to drive productivity and create more high-skilled jobs.”

“We’re thrilled to be part of such important advancements in, say, cancer detection and diagnosis,” said Matt Codrington, managing director, Lenovo Australia and New Zealand.

“We hope this is the first in many such partnerships with the VLSCI as we continue to work together to make data analytics work hard for healthcare applications.”

Pictured: VLSCI’s director, Professor Justin Zobel; VLSCI’s facility manager, Dr Vera Hansper; and Matt Codrington, MD, Lenovo ANZ.