To realise a new architecture and be prepared for the future, the High Performance Computing team has begun collaborating with The Hyve, a Utrecht-based open source bioinformatics company. This is to provide more granularity and flexibility in providing access to massive data sets used by multiple researchers.

Improvement of workflow and storage
We have noticed that it can take users quite some effort to reproduce and scale their HPC-based pipelines. We plan to address this by enabling Virtual Machines (VMs) on the cluster and implementing a workflow execution engine to facilitate researchers in seamlessly running their VMs.
Another issue that is high on our agendas is creating an affordable archive storage solution to ensure that the new archive environment will be available and accessible from within the HPC. To achieve this goal, we are working together with Utrecht University’s Information & Technology Services .
Our HPC will also enable users to enforce stricter policies in order to comply to the latest legislation and regulations pertaining to life sciences data.

Daily support in Life Sciences research
The Utrecht Bioinformatics Center’s HPC facility provides computing resources to accelerate the Life Science community in Utrecht. The HPC supports over 50 active researchers on a daily basis, all affiliated with the UMC Utrecht, Utrecht University, the Hubrecht Institute or the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology. With a total computing capacity of 1600 cores and 600TB of high performance storage, the facility is one of the larger academic compute facilities in the Netherlands.

If you would like to be part of a pilot project, or have a specific interest in one of these innovations, please contact us and we’ll see what we can do for you.

Contact
Joep de Ligt, Coordinator UMCU Bioinformatics Expertise Core (UBEC) at UMC Utrecht: technical coordination
Jeroen de Ridder, group leader Center for Molecular Medicine at UMC Utrecht: coordinating community effort