Information Technologies (IT)

The IT Department includes two areas:

• IT
• SIT (Scientific IT)

Mission and services of the IT area

The mission of the IT Department is to administer the IT assets and platforms at CRG and to provide highly effective computing support to the scientific community as well as to the administration and research support areas.

The services offered by the IT department are:

• HelpDesk: provide solutions to “tickets” from the Request Tracker, complete user administration, installation and support of desktop and laptop computers (hardware and software), technical support for the meeting rooms, printer maintenance, antivirus software, complete support for telephone lines and devices, redistribution of equipment (physical connections, computer configuration) and solutions to any other IT problem CRG Staff Handbook /July 2015 Page 35 of 57 CRG Staff Handbook / July 2015
• systems administration: administrate the common information technology platform systems and the isolated scientific information technology platforms
• web development and administration: develop and support the CRG intranet webpages and applications and the CRG website, and provide administration and support for the scientific webpages

Scientific Information Technologies (SIT) overview

The area provides computing resources and technical support to CRG researchers. The area has the necessary expertise to build high-performance computing systems in the coming years, taking the high compute and bandwidth capabilities required by researchers into account.

SIT delivers know-how and best practices to users for the optimal usage of computing resources, improving application performance and providing them with regular training.

SIT as an operations team administers more than 200 compute nodes and servers. The area manages a computing cluster comprised of 3112 cores interconnected with a 10Gb Ethernet network.

The exponential growth in genomic data, particularly from Next-Gen Sequencing (NGS), demands high-performance and scalable storage infrastructures. The area manages heterogeneous disk-based storage that contains research data, currently 5 PB of usable storage in two different data centres.

This area has become a key partner in many of the research projects carried out at the institute.

Services

• Linux HPC cluster support
• Database and server administration
• Storage provisioning
• Cluster and Linux regular training

Equipment

• Linux cluster with 3112 cores for computing and more than 200 compute nodes and servers.
• Univa Grid Engine batch queuing system
• 5 PB of storage (EMC-Isilon, DDN, Nexsan)
  • 87 compute nodes:
    • 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680 20M Cache 8 core at 2.70 Ghz
    • 128 GB RAM (8 GB/core)
  • 56 compute nodes:
    • 2 Intel Xeon E5530 4 core at 2.40GHz
    • 48 GB memory (6 GB/core)
  • 1 High memory compute node:
    • 8-processor Intel Xeon E7450 6 core at 2.40 GHz
    • 512 GB memory
  • 1 High memory compute node:
    • 4-processor Intel Xeon E7540 6 core at 2.00 GHz
    • 256 GB memory
  • 63 heterogeneous compute nodes with different

Members