Go Virtual attended ISC in June 2015
During ISC in Frankfurt, Dr. Ulrich Meier, Director Presales at Go Virtual Germany, gave to presentations on success stories where new technologies are involved.
The first presentation – held at the Intel booth – was about an installation in the field of Life Sciences at the DKFZ (German Cancer Research Center) in Heidelberg. DKFZ is the largest Next-Generation-Sequencing facility, using Illumina HiseqX with a capacity of sequencing a 18,000 individual human genomes per year. The goal is the genome comparison for individual patients of cancerous tissue with healthy tissue and the reference genome to find the molecular difference of cancer types in order to apply the right treatment. This is an important step toward the long promised “personalized medicine”. Each sequencing run produce about 70 GB of raw data – or 1.3 PB per year, which needs to be processed fast and according to the DKFZ quality standards. This is were the the compute cluster solution from Go Virtual comes into play. The complex data processing pipeline used by DKFZ requires a combination of parallel and high-throughput processing, where the data exchange between pipeline steps is done by IO of millions of small file. The cluster composed of 30 Hewlett-Packard Apollo 6000 servers with 512 GB memory, two 14 core Intel Xeon Haswell CPUs and 1.6 TB Intel NVMe SSD scratch space per node perfectly masters this heavy compute load. Intel’s MVMe technology boosts IOPS by avoiding SCSI and SAS interfaces of classic SSDs and opens the full PCIe performance and bandwidth for small file IO.
For more information on Intel’s MVMe SSDs see: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/intel-ssd-dc-family-for-pcie.html
The second presentation – given at CoolIT’s booth – was also about a Life Siences customer, the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis (CBS) at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The challenge here was to retrofit liquid cooling solution into existing systems such that the minimum water inlet temperature was 40 °C and the hot water could be used to heat adjacent buildings. The cooling solution had to be retrofit into existing server systems housed in the container environment at CBS.
Direct Contact Liquid Cooling from CoolIT Systems: “Rack DCLC CHx40” was applied to enable reuse of energy. Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL560 Gen8 servers were cooled using CoolIT’s centralized pumping CHx40 technology, where cooling liquid is distributed through stainless steel manifolds, as shown of the photos below. All metal, dry-break quick connects allow for hot-swappable servicing of any single server.
By combining HP ProLiant servers andCoolIT’s efficient and affordable technologies Go Virtual showcases the implementation of Green IT. For more information on CoolIT’s Rack DCLC Chx40 see:
https://www.coolitsystems.com/index.php/data-center/liquid-cooling-options/rack-dclc-chx40.html
