KwGrid:Partners/Ohio State University

Ohio State University, Department of Biomedical Informatics

• Contact(s): Joel Saltz, Tony Pan

Facilities and Equipment

In collaboration with the Ohio Supercomputer Center, the department of Biomedical Informatics has developed a cluster configuration to support analysis, exploration and visualization of biomedical data from imaging, laboratory and simulation studies. This configuration has the disk space, memory and computational ability to act as the primary data integration and exploration engine to support Ohio State’s biomedical research programs. The machine configuration is a heterogeneous cluster consisting of the following platforms: BMI Data-centric cluster, consisting of 1 front-end host and 24 back-end nodes, each of which has 300GB storage capacity (aggregate storage capacity of 7.2 Terabytes), IA64 Compute cluster, a 72 node compute cluster at OSC consisting of 64-bit dual-processor Itanium nodes, one 32 processor SGI Altix 3000 for SMP and large memory applications configured with 64 GB of memory, and an 8 TB RAID I/O subsystem, with both Gigabit and 100Mbit Ethernet and Myrinet 2000 interconnect. The RAID I/O system serves as a traditional parallel file system that will run on several Pentium III nodes, with each node having an IDE RAID system with up to 8 large IDE disks. Athlon Computer cluster, a 64 node cluster at OSC, with each node having dual 32bit processor AMD system running 1.4GHz AMD Athlon XP CPUs with 2GB DDR2100 memory, 80GB IDE hard drive, with 100mbit Ethernet and a 64 port Myrinet 2000 interconnect. This cluster is a concrete demonstration of the cooperation between the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Ohio Supercomputer Center; the tightly coupled, co-located 7.2 TB, 24 processor storage cluster has been purchased by the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Itanium cluster, the 8 TB RAID I/O subsystem, and Athlon Computer Cluster have been purchased by the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

The Ohio Supercomputer Center has received funds to build a large scale mass storage system. The mass storage system has been acquired and currently is being built. This system has multiple levels of storage at different conceptual distances from compute hardware and with different usage and management patterns. This acquisition will allow a wide range of simultaneous production and research uses. The overall storage system consists of a core 50 TB high-throughput Fibre Channel RAID disk arrays, a 400 TB pool of inexpensive IDE RAID disk arrays, 128 TB tape storage and a cluster of 20 PCs dedicated to providing “active” access to storage. All of the components will be connected to each other and other machines of OSC through Fibre Channel switches.

The Multiscale Computing Laboratory in the department houses two small storage clusters with 1.25 TB and 16 TB storages, respectively. The first one is a 5-node IA32 cluster with dual Xeon CPUs. Each node of this cluster has 250GB RAID disk space, 2GB memory, and dual Gigabit network cards. The nodes are inter-connected via a dedicated Gigabit Switch. The second one consists of 7 nodes with dual 64-bit AMD Opteron 240 CPUs. Each node has 8 GB memory, dual Gigabit network cards and SATA RAID system with 8 250GB disks. The nodes are inter-connected via a dedicated Gigabit Switch. The laboratory also has several PCs, each of which has Pentium 4 CPUs, 512MB main memory, 80GB disk space. These PCs are used as workstations for code development and debugging.

Biomedical Informatics has over 4,000 sq. ft. on the third floor of Graves Hall available to the project. An additional 6,000 square feet in Graves Hall is under renovation and will be completed in 2004. This space will house post-doctoral trainees, graduate students and computer areas for use by the current application and other projects. Included in this renovation is dedicated space for clusters. The renovated space provides an optimal operational environment for the clusters and office space for the systems administrator and other staff.

---