Life Science Grid

Why a Life Science Grid?

Today's Life Scientists need to have advanced High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities at their disposal. For that reason, and commissioned by NBIC, SARA places powerful computer clusters at the local sites of interested universities and academic hospitals. These clusters can then be used for experiments. We at SARA, together with the user community, take care of support. Currently, the first clusters have been delivered, and are extensively utilized.

For whom?

For some scientific disciplines, such as high-energy physics and quantum chemistry, High Performance Computing (HPC) is part of the standard toolkit. For other scientific disciplines, for example the Life Sciences, this is not yet the case. Yet, HPC can be of big interest here as well.

SARA’s support

To outsiders, HPC and especially Grid technology may seem daunting. With the Life Science Grid project, SARA aims to close the gap between the Life Sciences and HPC facilities. Accordingly, computer clusters are built at various locations throughout the Netherlands. We maintain these clusters from a distance, allowing users to fully focus on their research.

Current users

Currently, the Life Science Grid is able to run 2400 jobs concurrently. Clusters have been placed in Amsterdam (NKI and AMC), Nijmegen, Wageningen, Leiden, Utrecht, Groningen, Delft and Rotterdam. All clusters are interconnected by the fast SURFnet network. Locally, every cluster can be utilized as a traditional computer cluster, thus leveraging significant computational power and data storage.

Virtual supercluster

The true force of the Life Science Grid, though, is that the clusters together form a Computing and Storage Grid, a virtual supercluster. Applications running locally on the cluster can also be executed in a distributed fashion on the entire Grid.

Clusters on site

By placing the computer clusters on site, we facilitate tight integration with local ICT infrastructure and present measuring equipment. Participants may share their data, but can also protect their data from others and keep it within the premises. On their local cluster, participants have extra permissions. E.g., one can log in on the local cluster, which in some cases greatly simplifies debugging of (self-built) applications.

Currently, ten small clusters are in place at the following sites:

• LUMC – Leiden
• WUR – Wageningen
• UU – Utrecht
• NKI – Amsterdam
• AMC – Amsterdam
• Radboud Universiteit – Nijmegen
• ErasmusMC – Rotterdam
• Technische Universiteit - Delft
• Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
• Keygene - Wageningen

Each of these clusters have either 16 or 32 cores and 18 Tb of storage space.

Use of and Access to the Life Science Grid

If you want to know more or want to make use of the Life Science Grid please click here, or send an email to grid.support@sara.nl.

Links

• NBIC: www.nbic.nl