Computing hardware for big data editing, storage, and analysis

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The big data era of research has caused an avalanche of data that has buried the current computer storage and processing technology in the Department of Animal Biosciences (formerly Department of Animal and Poultry Science) at University of Guelph. The ever-increasing processing of data has outstripped the current ability to analyze data properly, efficiently, and in a timely manner. This grant will support the purchase of three high performance computer nodes, a storage server and a fabric network to integrate the new nodes and storage server to the computer nodes and storage currently available in the Department for interdisciplinary and collaborative research involving big data, a common feature of novel research in precision agriculture. The Department of Animal Biosciences has a vibrant and productive group of 27 faculty and about 110 graduate students and 20 postdocs, who conduct research in nutrition, behaviour, physiology, meat science, genetics, and genomics. Over the last ten years the direction of research in the department and around the world has moved towards precision agriculture related technologies, such as the different omics (e.g. genomics, proteomics, metabolomics), real time recording and monitoring, etc., which yield big amounts of data to be processed, stored and analyzed. The proposed equipment to face these computational demands is a central high performance file storage system with at least 150TB for researcher home directories with several high performance nodes, large memory, many core systems connected to the storage via 10GB/s switches. These features combined will allow for running 5 times as many jobs simultaneously as currently done and it is anticipated that each job will be 5-10 times faster. High speed connectivity to the Internet will also allow big data exchanges with collaborating researchers in other institutions, as well as own research stations (Alma, Arkell, and Elora). Access to a faster and more powerful computing hardware will improve the quality and productivity of research involving big data in the Department of Animal Biosciences, which will be essential for the Department to maintain and increase its leadership in providing agri-based solutions to national and international issues while enhancing profitability and competitiveness of farmers, the agri-food systems, and Canadian industry.