High Performance Computing Core

Function

The High-Performance Computing Core has two High Performance Computers (HPC) to facilitate and improve research in Bioinformatics, large-scale ecosystem analysis, spatial statistics and phylogenetic analysis.

This large memory server was tailored to assist in analyses of “next generation” sequencing datasets. The task of assembling whole genomes and transcriptomes from millions of short sequences reads requires large memory capabilities and this computer serves the needs of researchers working in these areas. Although the server is designed for bioinformatics, researchers in need of large memory computing will be able to have their application-specific software installed.

Recognizing the importance of the research that this type of resource can help address, the High-Performance Computing Core at East Carolina provides computational power and technical support to both academia and industry. These services are available to faculty and students within the University system and are available at negotiated rates to other academic institutions, government, and industry.

Instrumentation

The IBM Intelligent Cluster solution is based on IBM BladeCenter HS22 servers with 96 computer cores (Intel® Xeon® 5650 processors), and remote management from Gridcore. Two quad-core HS22 servers act as the head node and storage node, and a further eight HS22 servers act as the compute nodes, each configured with two 6-core Intel Xeon 5650 processors. A 2U storage enclosure within the BladeCenter chassis contains ten 600 GB 15,000 rpm SAS drives. With this system, researchers at ECU now can run up to ten typical computing jobs in parallel boosting productivity and analysis speed the higher performance enables larger problems to be tackled/solved.

The Dell PowerEdge R910 Server consists of 1 TB Memory (64×16 GB), 1066 MHz, Quad Ranked LV RDIMMs using 4 x Intel Xeon X7550 2 GHz processors, a PERC H700 Raid controller with 2 x 146 GB 15 Krpm SCSI hotplug hard drives and additionally 4 x 1TB 7.2. Krpm SAS hard drives.

Contact Us