Data storage unit for high-performance computation in genomics / Unité de sauvegarde de données pour calculs de haute-performance en génomique

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Recent progress in DNA sequencing technologies is transforming biology. Genetic information can now be decoded at an unprecedented speed and low cost. These advances allow experiments that would otherwise be particularly difficult to tackle. However, a consequence of this phenomenon is that data analysis now requires more specialized pieces of hardware and software to manage very large datasets in a reasonable time. Our research groups have a direct access to the supercomputer Mammouth2 located on the main campus of the Université de Sherbrooke. As of October 2011, Mammouth2 is the most powerful computer in Canada with an outstanding computational capacity provided by over 38,000 processors and 51,000 gigabytes of RAM. However, little hard drive storage capacity is available to our research groups within this infrastructure. We are therefore requesting a rapid, high-performance data storage system directly wired to Mammouth2 for performing demanding genomics analyses. This storage system is an essential addition for accessing an otherwise state-of-the-art infrastructure and addressing the new bioinformatics analysis bottleneck found in most genomics project such as genome assembly, comparative genomics, transcriptomics (RNA-seq), chromatin-immunoprecipitation-sequencing (ChIP-seq) assays, metagenomics studies, etc. This will allow Canadian researchers in biology to harness the full power of new nucleic acids sequencing technologies by enabling and considerably accelerating challenging analyses.