JGI Migrates Sequencing Workloads to NERSC

According to an article at GenomeWeb, the Joint Genome Institute announced on April 12 that their massive upcoming increase of raw sequence data has prompted a decision to consolidate their high performance computing platforms into the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center [NERSC].  The agreement will include the transfer of six Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory employees to NERSC in order to assist in the daily management and operational duties associated with the sequencing workloads.

In that alone, you can tell why we need that computational horsepower that we could handle on our own, but now it’s getting to the point where it’s just crazy. Why build something in house when we’ve got a partnership where all the folks who are, in effect, being transferred over to NERSC? They’ve been Lawrence Berkeley people anyhow, so it’s not a major change from their perspective,” Gilbert said.

The agreement includes the first new system, a 500 node SGI machine, to be managed by the new group at NERSC.

n general, genomics is a pretty good fit for cloud computing, and they were able to take advantage of that,” Broughton said.”The new sequencers are producing ever-increasing flows of data, and it’s important to make sure that the computational infrastructure scales appropriately to match it,” [Jeff Broughton, Department head at NERSC] added.

For more info on the move of the JGI HPC workloads to NERSC, read the full article here.