Revised Jan 2015 – use this version – stored on wiki as FacOtherResEquip-Jan2015.docx
FACILITIES & OTHER RESOURCES
Michigan State University:
Dr. Cole’s Center for Microbial Ecology’s bioinformatics group is housed in a 300 sq ft. office in the Biomedical
and Physical Sciences Building. An additional 700 sq ft. server facility houses our server rack.
MSU iCER
In addition to managing the university supercomputers through the HPCC, the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research
(iCER) employs several research specialists that are available to provide one-on-one consulting for advanced
research computing. The research specialists have extensive experience in complex workflows, leveraging
1umerical libraries, and are familiar with many different parallel programming paradigms. Collectively, their
specializations include: bioinformatics, image vision and numerical methods
EQUIPMENT
Michigan State University:
The RDP has six Apple Mac Pro multi-core dual CPU workstations, five Apple iMac and PCs and of 14TB of
storage capacity with an additional 1TB of storage backed up daily to removable hard drives using a towers of Hanoi
rotation scheme. An OpenBSD-based encrypted IPSec VPN connects the CME Computer Laboratory rack-mount
servers and the RDP Office network. The RDP uses three SunFire V20z dual Opteron 1U, one SunFire X2200
32GB Memory and two Dell PowerEdge R410 hosting 6 Virtual Machines for serving RDP web services. The RDP
compute cluster consists of 1 32GB, 8 virtual core VM, three SunFire X2200m2 dual processor dual core compute
servers, two with 32GB of RAM and one with 64GB of RAM. Three uninterruptable power supply systems protect
RDP database and web server hardware. One Sunfire X2200 with 24GB of RAM serves as a database host running
PostgreSQL 8.4. A Dell PowerEdge R415 hosts a 4TB nfs server and acts as a proxy load balancer to distribute web
requests to the various RDP sites to one of the back end servers. All RDP servers run CentOS 6.3 except the three
SunFire V20zs which run CentOS 5.8 (latest 5.x release).
MSU Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (iCER)
Compute Resources
The High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) presently maintains six clusters, along with additional testing
nodes. Each cluster has a different combination of memory and interconnects. All nodes run Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 6.3, and are binary compatible with each other. The HPCC also manages job scheduling on idle university
computers (approximately 6000 cores) using a Condor scheduler.
Storage Resources
The HPCC provides secure, high-speed file spaces to users. Research spaces and home directories are replicated
offsite nightly, and hourly ZFS snapshots are available. The replicated file spaces feature 1.8GB/s writes and 6GB/s
reads. Data integrity and availability from our replicated file spaces are guaranteed for four years. The high-speed
parallel Lustre file space features 5 GB/s writes and 8GB/s reads. Each compute node also has an attached local disk
that can be used within a Hadoop-on-demand for data intensive jobs.