Building the knoSYS 100 Genome Supercomputer

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knoSYS_Church_v2Over at Bio-IT World, Michael Fein from Silicon Mechanics describes how his company worked with Knome to design and build the first-of-its-kind Genome Supercomputer.

The hardware ultimately selected is a high-performance grid computing system that integrates eight servers in a rack—all optimized to support 10 or more simultaneous users running Knome’s interpretation software and informatics engine. The use of industry-standard components, including the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 product family, reduces upfront capital and long-term support costs compared to other commonly available hardware solutions. The appliance includes a high-performance computing cluster with four nodes, each with two 8-core/16-thread, 2.4 GHz, 64-bit Intel Xeon Processors E5-2665 with 20MB cache. The same chips were used in the 1-node database server included in the knoSYS 100. The Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 product family gave Knome performance gains of up to 80 percent over a previous generation Intel Xeon processor-based server and provides the reduced I/O latency Knome required with Intel Integrated I/O. In addition, the processors are upgradable to the next-generation product family, Intel Xeon Processors E5-2600v2. Storage is provided by a ClusterStor appliance, a commercial version of the Lustre storage system developed by Seagate’s Xyratex division.

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