Description
With the advent of more powerful and effective scientific instrumentation (such as next generation sequencers in genomics), the complexity and amount of data being generated is exploding. The ability to process, analyse and ultimately act on this data is becoming a critical element of research success.
In such data intensive science High Performance Computing (HPC) is an indispensable tool. This system gives researchers access to compute power that up till now was hardly available. This leads to a faster time to market, cost reductions, better quality of products and above all the opportunity to explore data and models in a more sophisticated way.
Set-up HPC Anunna
The HPC Anunna is designed as a high available and versatile platform. Whether your job needs lots of memory, raw compute power or enormous storage demands, this HPC Anunna can handle your requests. The current system contains 2000 cores, 4 GPU nodes and 1000 TB of parallel storage and a fast internal infiniband network.
As a shared facility the system is used by multiple users. Users insert their jobs in a queueing system and the workload manager software handles these requests in order of priority and available free hardware.
The HPC Annuna is housed in a professional datacentre in a secure environment and with constant temperature and power supply. Different backup solutions are available to safeguard the data from loss. All data in the home-drives are back-up daily. Besides that, users can choose to back-up their compute-data as well.
Technical Details
Hardware
- 48x Computes: 16 cores, 64 GB memory or 128 GB, Intel Xeon, 2.2 GHz
- 29 x Computes nodes: 32 cores, 328 GB memory, Intel Xeon Gold, 2.1 GHz
- 2x Fat nodes: 64 cores, 1 TB memory, AMD Opteron, 2.3 GHz
- 2x Fat nodes: 64 cores, 1,5 TB memory, Intel Xeon Gold, 2.1 GHz
- 4x GPU nodes: NVIDIA Tesla V10
- 1500 TB Lustre parallel file system (15 GB/s)
- 56 Gb/s FDR Infiniband network
- Connected to a fast internet connection (SURFnet)
Software
- Scientific Linux on the nodes
- Jobs scheduling is done with Slurm
- Bright Cluster Management software
- BC Platform
- Compilers: Parallel Studio XE 2017 from Intel, Open64, Gcc
- Software: R, ASReml, Python, SPARK, Java, Octave, GEOS, Galaxy, MATLAB, Jupyter Hub
- File formats: NetCDF, HDF5, GDAL
- MPI: MPICH, MVAPICH, Open MPI
The software is continuously subject to upgrades and installation of new software packages
Applications
The HPC Anunna can be used for a variety of research applications within the domain of the life sciences and living environment. It can be used for bioinformatics, modelling, simulations, analysis and visualisation of data.
Examples are:
- Genomics research bioinformatics
- Climate models
- Modelling of river beds
- Modelling of food structures
Advantages HPC Anunna
- Fast computing: The HPC Anunna cluster has a computing power of 13 TeraFlops. Because of its size, this HPC Annuna offers users the possibility to compute jobs in parallel and to use multiple nodes for a job.
- Support and knowledge sharing: support for new and experienced users is available and appreciated by the users. Regularly HPC Anunna-related courses on different levels are organized.
- Service: the HPC Anunna is a full service platform. Maintenance and technical management are taken care of.
- Community: the user groups and wiki give users the opportunity to share tips and tricks, experiences, knowledge and developed software. In this way your research can be accelerated.
- Pay only for what you use: compute power is be charged per used core per second. Storage is charged by the actual usage. Also flat-fee arrangements are possible.
- Easy start-up: users can easily access and use the HPC Anunna to use their own models. In addition, many software is already installed and ready to use.
Complementary Techniques
WIKI
On wiki.anunna.wur.nl you can find more user information