Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Creates HPC Cluster with FlashDisk OpenSAN for Department of Computational Biology.BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Winchester Systems Inc., a leading data storage solutions company, today announced that Dana Farber Cancer Institute's Department of Computational Biology Not to be confused with Biologically-inspired computing. Computational biology is an interdisciplinary field that applies the techniques of computer science, applied mathematics, and statistics to address problems inspired by biology. has built a high performance computing and storage infrastructure using their FlashDisk OpenSAN products. Nikos George, director of scientific computing at Dana Farber, was challenged to put together the best systems and storage infrastructure for the demands of their new, expanded mission and do it quickly at the best price. The new organization hired more researchers with the intent of ramping up operations fast. "The backbone would be a high performance computer cluster A computer cluster is a group of tightly coupled computers that work together closely so that in many respects they can be viewed as though they are a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area , a SAN and an Oracle RAC In database computing, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) — an extra-charge[1] option for the Oracle Database software produced by Oracle Corporation — provides clustering and high availability in Oracle database environments. (real application cluster) database," says George. Forty computer nodes would connect to the SAN, five would handle the Oracle RAC database and five would act as Web servers. For the SAN storage Dana Farber turned to FlashDisk OpenSAN with an FX-608e RAID head running 8 TB of storage in four enclosures each with 16 disk drives of 146 GB on a Fibre Channel fabric A Fibre Channel fabric (or Fibre Channel switched fabric, FC-SW) is a switched fabric of Fibre Channel devices enabled by a Fibre Channel switch. Fabrics are normally subdivided by Fibre Channel zoning. Each fabric has a name server and provides other services. connected via Q-logic switches. The solution is scalable for future needs, "We can scale simply by adding more drive shelves. We can also add another RAID head," says George. "We could double the number of 4 Gb/s connections if we ever needed more, although we are not yet near to saturating the link." George confirms that the SAN from Winchester Systems is exceeding expectations, "We have been able to avoid the kind of performance hits that others had experienced, and the price is right," says George. A customer testimonial story is available on the Winchester Systems web site with more details on the Dana Farber Cancer Institute high performance computing application: www.winsys.com. About Winchester Systems, Inc. Winchester Systems provides network-attached storage, direct-attached storage, tiered-storage and storage area network enterprise data storage solutions. These solutions include high performance iSCSI, SCSI SCSI in full Small Computer System Interface Once common standard for connecting peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, etc.) to small and medium-sized computers. SCSI has given way to faster standards, such as Firewire and USB. , SATA (Serial ATA) A serial version of the ATA (IDE) interface, which has been the de facto standard hard disk interface for desktop PCs for more than two decades. The original Parallel ATA (PATA) interface was launched in 1986. and Fibre Channel RAID disk arrays; tape backup devices and other high performance commercial and military grade data storage for mid-range servers including Windows, Windows Clusters, Linux, Linux Clusters, and UNIX UNIX Operating system for digital computers, developed by Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in 1969. It was initially designed for a single user (the name was a pun on the earlier operating system Multics). . For more information visit Winchester Systems on the web at www.winsys.com. |
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