IBERS HPC reaches one million job submissions

'Bert and Ernie'

This week on Monday 2nd of February 2015 at exactly 14:06:25 the High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster at the Institute of Biological, Environmental & Rural Sciences (IBERS) completed one million individual job submissions. Each job represents an analysis of the genetics of natural systems such as plants, animals and microbial communities.

The HPC is now used by over 100 researchers to complete bioinformatics tasks such as genome assembly, alignment and annotation. These computationally intensive tasks are only be possible using a system with enough compute power, memory and storage. Built by ClusterVision, the IBERS compute cluster was commissioned at the end of March 2012 and named ‘'Bert and Ernie', (after characters from from the popular U.S. Children's television show Sesame Street) due to there being two servers which work together to manage the cluster. Ernie is the master node which manages the compute nodes, monitoring and job submission, while Bert is the login node which users interact with. Over the last three years the HPC has been upgraded several times and now totals 536 CPU cores, 3.5TB of RAM and almost 300TB of storage capacity.

Job number one-million was submitted by Dr Narcis Fernandez-Fuentes, Reader in Genomics and Bioinformatics at IBERS who explained that “this particular job was for the mining of the Rye Grass genome, Lolium Perenne, looking for genes that are homologues to annotated genes linked to drought tolerance in a number of model organism: Arabidopsis, rice, wheat and Brachypodium.” The results will help plant breeders in IBERS to develop drought tolerant grasses for UK livestock farmers.

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