AUSTIN, TX — Supercomputing 2015 — Silicon Mechanics, a provider of servers, storage and high-performance computing solutions, announced sponsorship of a joint venture between the Middleton, MA-based BioTeam, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), which is located in Austin. Per the details of this sponsorship, Silicon Mechanics and technology hardware provider Supermicro will collaborate to supply high-density compute nodes and ZFS storage systems to BioTeam’s new Converged Infrastructure Lab located at TACC.
“BioTeam’s Converged Infrastructure Lab, our partnership with TACC, and our collaborations with innovators like Silicon Mechanics represent the rare opportunity for us to solve some of the biggest scientific computing problems that life-science researchers face today,” says Ari Berman, General Manager for BioTeam and Lead Architect for the Lab. “The Lab gives us the opportunity to create and test reference architectures that work for real scientific workflows that extend from the Laboratory through knowledge creation. The success of that goal relies on successful convergence across all of the IT infrastructure in between.”
The BioTeam Converged Infrastructure Lab is designed to enable future scientific advancements by integrating cutting-edge computational hardware, software, networking and storage solutions. This integration will serve as the foundation for the development of proof-of-concept architectures that are designed to push the boundaries of research computing, while gaining an understanding of how to architect the best HPC environment for scientific research to operate within.
“We are excited to join BioTeam and TACC in providing key-building blocks in the lab infrastructure,” says Art Mann, Silicon Mechanics’ Sr. Director, Life Sciences Practice. “Not only will we be supporting future advancements in research computing, but access to this lab will provide our customers the opportunity to benchmark their workloads with the proof of concept architectures developed. This is an exciting endeavor, and we are honored to be part of the program moving forward.”
“Silicon Mechanics has been a key collaborator for several BioTeam projects, and we have been impressed with their commitment to innovative solutions and customer service,” says Adam Marko, Scientific Consultant for BioTeam and Project Manager for the Lab. “We are excited about integrating their solutions to advance life science research.”
“TACC, BioTeam, and Silicon Mechanics are natural collaborators on the Converged Infrastructure Laboratory, because we’re all dedicated to providing real-world solutions to the computational challenges faced in data-intensive research domains like the life sciences,” said Matthew Vaughn, Director of Life Sciences Computing at TACC. “We see a substantial year-over-year increase in data-intensive computing arising from our biomedical and life science users, and we’ve adapted our infrastructure to meet those demands. The Converged Infrastructure Laboratory helps us accelerate that process by providing a way to evaluate a diverse set of vendors and system architectures.”
