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Ideally, the compute nodes in a cluster should be as identical as possible since the performance of parallel computation is bounded by
the slowest component in the cluster. Heterogeneous clusters do work, but it requires careful execution to achieve the best
performance; however, for Life Sciences applications, heterogeneous clusters make perfect sense to handle completely independent
workloads such as DNA-Seq, De Novo assembly or Molecular Dynamics Simulations. These workloads require quite different hardware
components. Hence, we recommend Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 as a compute node to handle NGS data processing due to its
density, a wide choice of CPUs, and high maximum memory capacity. Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 is an optional node with 6TB of
RDIMM /LRDIMM memory and is recommended for customers who need to run applications requiring large memory such as De Novo
assembly. Accelerators are used to speed up computationally intensive applications, such as molecular dynamics simulation
applications. We tested configurations G and K for this solution.
The compute and management infrastructure consists of the following components.
 Compute
o Dell EMC PowerEdge C6400 enclosure with 4x C6420 servers
 High-performance computing workloads, such as scientific simulations, seismic processing and data analytics, rely on
compute performance, memory bandwidth and overall server efficiency to reduce processing time and data center
costs.
 It provides an optimized compute and storage platform for HPC and scale-out workloads with up to four independent
two-socket servers with flexible 24 x 2.5” or 12 x 3.5” high capacity storage in a compact 2U shared infrastructure
platform.
 It also supports up to 512GB of memory per server node, for a total of 2TB of memory in a highly dense and modular
2U solution.
o Dell EMC PowerEdge C4130 with up to four NVIDIA
®
Tesla™ P100 or V100 GPUs
 It provides supercomputing agility and performance in an ultra-dense platform purpose-built for scale-out HPC
workloads. Speed through the most complex research, simulation and visualization problems in medicine, finance,
energy exploration, and related fields without compromising on versatility or data center space.
 Get results faster with greater precision by combining up to two Intel
®
Xeon
®
E5-2690 v4 processors and up to four
300W dual-width PCIe accelerators in each C4130 server. Support for an array of NVIDIA
®
Tesla™ GPUs and Intel
Xeon Phi™ coprocessors, along with up to 256GB of DDR4 memory, gives you ultimate control in matching your
server architecture to your specific performance requirements.
 This server is an optional component for molecular dynamics simulation applications.
o Dell EMC PowerEdge R940
 The Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 is a 4-socket, 3U platform, equipped with the Intel
®
Xeon
®
Platinum 8168 2.7GHz
(24 cores per socket – 96 cores in server or 28 cores per socket – 112 cores in server with Intel
®
Xeon
®
Platinum
8180(M) Processor) and is dubbed “the fat node,” because of its 6 TB of memory capacity.
 This server is an optional component that can be added to the solution for De Novo assembly, visualization and/or
large statistical analysis.
 Management
o Dell EMC PowerEdge R440 for master node
 It is used by Bright Cluster Manager
®
to provision, manage and monitor the cluster.
 Optionally, a high availability (HA) configuration is also available by adding an additional server and set them in an
active-passive HA state.
o Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 for login node and CIFS gateway (optional)
 These components are optional.
 Typically, a master node can manage user logins without a problem. However, it is wise to separate login/job
scheduling from a master node when the number of users grows larger. The login node can also be configured in HA
mode by adding an additional server.
 This optional CIFS gateway can help data transferring from NGS sequencers to a shared storage.
Storage Components
The storage infrastructure consists of the following components:
 Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC NFS Storage (NSS7.0-HA) (4)
 Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Lustre Storage (4)
 Dell EMC Isilon Scale-out NAS Product Family; Dell EMC Isilon F800 All-flash (5)
or Dell EMC Isilon Hybrid Scale-out NAS H600 (5)