University of Tübingen Installs ClusterVision HPC System to Advance Bioinformatics Services

The de.NBI Cloud Tübingen provides generic virtual machines and generic cloud storage similar to other commercial cloud providers. By installing ClusterVision’s state-of-the-art GPU cluster, de.NBI Cloud Tübingen increases the cloud GPU capacity to extend the bioinformatics services at its five sites in Germany.The cluster is powered by a parallel filesystem storage that provides the life-sciences scientists increased abilities to perform biomedical research and store the date with ease. Storage is an important aspect for these scientists as they generate voluminous data from their research which is carefully analyzed to draw out vital inferences. The cluster and cloud integration also provides a secure and resilient environment suitable for the handling of sensible genomics and health data. It not only provides the physical resources but also supports and accompanies the organizational aspects of academic research projects dealing with sensible data underlying GDPR regulations.

Dr. Jens Krüger, Group Leader High Performance and Cloud Computing at University of Tübingen, comments on his experience regarding the installation, “I am happy and satisfied with how things work as they are so organized. We would be happy if ClusterVision joins our future tenders based on machine learning.” The cluster installation makes the cloud versatile enough for bioinformaticians and researchers from the broad field of life sciences, facilitating research covering the full spectrum from phylogeny of birds, fundamental plant research, single-cell cancer research, microbiome of livestock to collections of Covid virus strains.

The new cluster has a total of 120 Teraflop double and 3.7 Petaflop single precision GPU performance; with a total of 1M Cuda and 32K Tensor cores – all built on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture. There’s in total 4.6TByte of GDDR6 GPU memory available for the calculations. Furthermore, there are 5200 CPU cores available running at 2.1 GHz, based on the Cascade Lake Intel CPU family.

“The Eberhard Karls University Tübingen is a leading AI/HPC and cloud center in Germany, we’re honored having provided an essential addition to the pre-existing infrastructure. From order till full acceptance, took under 8 weeks, a considerable feat considering the current global chip shortages and complexity of the project, not least thanks to our partners NVIDIA and Gigabyte”, commented Dr. Alex Ninaber, Director HPC, Cloud & Storage Solutions at ClusterVision.

About Tübingen

The Eberhard Karls University Tübingen is part of the German Network on Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI ). As such it is also one of six sites hosting part of the de.NBI Cloud. The cloud is providing compute and storage resources to researchers from the broad field of life sciences looking for a powerful and resilient environment to conduct their research. The overall concept for the de.NBI Cloud as a whole follows a federated concept with a common authentication and authorization infrastructure relying on ELIXIR AAI. The individual sites of the cloud differ slightly in their specific hardware resources, as well as in the spectrum of expertise.

About ClusterVision

ClusterVision specializes in high performance computing (HPC) solutions. HPC accelerates discovery. It is with this in mind that ClusterVision provides state-of-the-art, fully tailored HPC clusters to researchers and innovators all over Europe. With in-house software development and a large team of technical specialists (60% technical staff), we work to not just participate in HPC, but to advance the technology behind it. By providing customized solutions accompanied by an exhaustive set of services and trainings, we ensure that our customers can take maximum advantage of HPC technology in order to expand knowledge and advance their respective fields of study.