Scientific Computing
The Scientific Computing Workgroup as part of the Bioinformatics Department maintains the whole server, network, storage and backup infrastructure for DSMZ. To address continuously growing demands especially with respect to bioinformatics data analyses and scientific databases this server infrastructure is continually monitored, modernized and amended. A focus is set to scientifically needed high performance computing (HPC) resources.
For now, the server infrastructure consists of an 400G Ethernet core network, 100G Ethernet server network and 100G Infiniband storage network. With three HPC clusters consisting of one SMP system with 8 nodes, 128 Cores and 4 TB RAM, one 16 node cluster with 448 cores and 6 TB RAM and one 30 node cluster with a total of 2,720 cores and 24 TB RAM distributed in small, medium, large and extra-large sized nodes regarding memory. To provide enough throughput for the I/O demand in our clusters there is a high-performance storage with 4 PB capacity build with BeeGFS as file system and an upcoming high-performance storage with 6PB capacity to fullfil further capacity demands.
To back all systems up there is a state-of-the-art tape library with around 2,300 slots and 14 LT09 drives used which provides up to 41 PB of backup capacity. For archiving purpose is a modern Blu-ray archive with 1 PB on the fly accessible data positioned in a separate location.