Large memory HPC infrastructure to underpin world-class biological research

现代生物学研究几乎在每个阶段都使用计算机。随着我们用来生成数据的工具的改进，要分析的数据量大大增加，因此我们需要越来越大和更强大的计算机，以便能够理解我们可用的数据。数据的增加只是一个大小问题，这个问题可以通过将数据分成块并在单独的处理器。然而，对于其他项目，我们需要执行的分析要求我们在所有数据点之间进行比较，这意味着我们不能如此容易地将问题分解。虽然有一些聪明（但复杂）的方法可以在不同的处理器之间移动数据来解决这些特定的问题，但它们不能很好地扩展，这可能意味着使用“标准”高性能计算设备无法进行某些分析。这些项目需要访问专门的计算机系统，允许大量处理器同时共享同一大块内存。我们的目标是提供这些专门的计算机系统之一的使用权。使用这样一个系统将使爱丁堡的BBSRC资助的研究人员能够（a）更有效地分析现有的数据集，（B）设计实验和分析数据集，否则这些实验和数据集是不实际的，甚至是不可能的，以及（c）获得使用灵活配置的超级计算机的实践经验。计算机系统，并因此允许他们理解和测试他们的分析的哪些部分可能受益于在该计算机系统或替代配置的超级计算机系统（例如，每单位可用存储器具有更多数量的处理器的超级计算机系统）上运行。

Modern biological research uses computers at nearly every stage. As the instruments that we use to generate the data improve, the amount of data to be analysed has increased greatly, such that we need increasingly bigger and more powerful computers in order to be able to make sense of the data that we have available.For some projects, the increase in the data is simply a question of size and the problem can be addressed by breaking the data up into blocks and analysing each block on a separate processor. However, for other projects, the analyses that we need to perform require us to do comparisons across and between all the data points meaning that we can't split the problem up quite so easily. Whilst there are clever (but complicated) ways of moving data around between different processors to try to address these particular problems, they do not scale well, and this can mean that some analyses are simply not possible using "standard" high-performance computing equipment. These projects need access to specialised computer systems that allow large numbers of processors to share the same large block of memory at the same time. Our aim is to provide access to one of these specialised computer systems.Having access to such a system will allow BBSRC-funded researchers at Edinburgh to (a) analyse existing data sets more efficiently and to a greater depth, (b) design experiments and analyse data sets that would not otherwise be practical or even possible and (c) get hands-on experience of using a flexibly configured super-computer system and therefore allow them to understand and test which parts of their analyses might benefit from running on this, or an alternatively configured super-computer system e.g. one with a greater number of processors per unit of available memory.