Bioinformatics Center Has Selected Mellanox 56Gb IB

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced the Center for Biological and Sequence Analysis (CBS) at the Risø Campus of Denmark Technical University (DTU) has selected Mellanox’s FDR 56Gb IB solution for the center’s new supercomputer, making Denmark a leader in bioinformatics.

IB interconnect solution delivers the scalability, performance and bandwidth needed for researchers around the world to share information and collaborate on the molecular analysis of people and their diseases to discover patterns and determine treatment methods.

“This supercomputer was built specifically to work with very complex DNA, patient and lifestyle data – making it the only of its kind and positioning Denmark as a world leader in life science and pharmaceutical research,” said Peter Løngreen, deputy director, Department of Systems Biology. “The Mellanox FDR IB solution provided us the most bandwidth, greatest scalability potential and highest performance benchmarking to date. This enables our researchers to access and share data faster than ever before on a system that is à process rapidly growing and diverse volumes of data.“

DTU’s supercomputer can store over 7.5PB of data and has 92TB of fast memory over 560 servers, making it among the 125 largest computers in the world. FDR IB solution enables researchers on the DTU campus, as well as an estimated 500 users from around the world to take advantage of the processing power offered by the HPC, aiding in the effort to make advances in life sciences. Among these users will be those participating in the European research infrastructure ELIXIR, which Denmark joined last spring. ELIXIR is an infrastructure that connects many of Europe’s independent bioinformatics resources to form a HPC network, making it possible to utilize and analyze shared data in new and larger contexts.

By choosing Mellanox, DTU’s supercomputer is equipped with ant efficient interconnect technology and researchers will be able to expand their efforts when needed at an affordable rate while maintaining bandwidth and low latency, which ensures better performance and improved storage capabilities.

“DTU was initially attracted to Mellanox because of the scalability and value our solutions offer, but it was the low latency coupled with unparalleled bandwidth abilities that made us the primary choice for the University’s new supercomputer,” said Gilad Shainer, VP marketing, Mellanox. “High-performance computing plays a key role in industrial biotechnology and pharmaceutical research, and Mellanox’s FDR IB ensures researchers are able to collaborate and share the data critical to developing lifesaving treatments.“