Graduate School of Public Health
Crabtree Hall A308
130 Desoto Street
Pittsburgh PA 15261
412-383-7959 (phone)
412-624-3020 (fax)
barmada@pitt.edu (email)
http://www.hgen.pitt.edu/resources/cluster.html
The department of human genetics maintains a computational cluster which is available to researchers involved in health sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. This cluster is composed of 250 2Ghz PowerPC G5 processors, 8 867Mhz PIII processors, 10 1.53 Ghz Athalon processors, and 16 3Ghz Xeon processors with between 0.5-4Gb of physical RAM allocated to each processor (a total of 276 processors with 550Gb RAM). The cluster runs a combination of MacOS X (for the PowerPC processors) and Fedora Linux (for the Pentium, Xeon, and Athalon processors) system software with the Sun GridEngine software for process allocation. Most access is via command line, however the BioTeam Inquiry™ software is also installed, allowing users to interface with the system (for a limited number of tools) via a secure web-based interface. All of the programs required for bioinformatics and statistical genetics are available for the Linux and OS X operating systems, and many have XML-based front ends designed such that users can interact with these programs via the Inquiry™ interface. All of these machines are secured to allow only encrypted communication from the external network (using SSH). The storage space available exceeds 3.5Tb. All data on the cluster are stored redundantly, using redundant XserveRAID arrays as the primary storage container, a secondary (internal) RAID5 array for hourly backups, and another (off-site) XserveRAID array as a tertiary online backup container (with daily backups). Access is available on a per- project-basis, or for more extended usage. All inquiries and/or issues regarding the cluster should be directed to Dr. M. Michael Barmada (email: barmada@pitt.edu).
