Grant Info

Grant Information

In order to assist faculty in preparing grants, the CNRG maintains this page of descriptions for our services. This page describes the services we offer in a format that we have been told is what is most often needed.

Biocluster

Biocluster is the High Performance Computing (HPC) resource for the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Containing 2824 cores and over 27.7 TB of RAM, Biocluster has a mix of various RAM and CPU configurations on nodes to best serve the various computation needs of the IGB and the Bioinformatics community at UIUC. For storage, Biocluster has 1.5 Petabytes of storage on its GPFS filesystem for reliable high speed data transfers within the cluster. Networking in Biocluster is either 1, 10 or 40 Gigibit ethernet depending on the class of node and its data transfer needs.

Active Archive

Active Archive is a tape backup system for long term storage of large amounts (TBs) of data. It consists of a Spectralogic T950 Tape Library with LTO8 tape drives and a Black Pearl control system. This system is scalable to hold exabytes of data and can be accessed via a GUI, command line tools, and an Amazon compatible S3 interface.

File Server

The IGB has a fairly large amount of disk space available on the File-Server. Each user with an IGB systems account is allocated 20GB of storage space. In addition, each theme is allocated 5TB to be used at the theme leader’s discretion. Files can be transferred to and from the file server using SMB (standard windows file sharing) or sftp. All files ending with .iso, .mp3, .mp4, .mpg, and .avi are not backed up unless special accommodations are made. The file server is not to be used as a backup service for other servers or machines. Users can create private web pages in folders called public html in their home directories. Please contact CNRG if you have any questions or difficulties creating one of these folders.

Backup Server

The Backup Server consists of a LTO8 tape library. Using Bacula, we backup all the servers every evening, then once every six months, we backup this information to tape and start over again.

Computer Lab

The IGB computer lab consists of 48 Dell OptiPlex 5260 All-in-One computers with 21.5 inch displays. These computers use the Intel i5 processor, and are meant to perform normal, every day tasks such as web browsing or word processing. Using a software package provided by CCBoot, we are able to rapidly reconfigure the operating system and software of these machines. The bulk of the high performance processing is expected to be done on the cluster that is dedicated for use in the classroom and is described below. Additionally, the lab has a file/web/database server that can host information to facilitate any scheduled event.

Computer Lab Cluster

The IGB computer lab cluster is a part of the Biocluster. It consists of 10 Dell Poweredge R620 with 24 Intel Xeon E5-2697 at 2.7-Ghz, 348GB RAM and 10GB Ethernet. The intent of the cluster is to teach students how to use their applications in a high performance computing (HPC) environment. This would include experience with the Linux operating system, learning how to write scripts for submission of non-interactive jobs, and submission and monitoring of jobs through the SLURM job scheduler.