Hardware

1 files changed, 51 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/general/help/facilities.md b/general/help/facilities.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..83fcd1b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/general/help/facilities.md
@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+# Facilities
+
+The core GeneNetwork team maintains modern Linux servers and storage
+systems for genomic and genetic analysis. These machines are
+maintained in the main UTHSC machine room in the Lamar Alexander
+Building in Memphis. The whole team has access to this space for
+upgrades and hardware maintenance. Issues and work packages are
+tracked through a Trello board and we use git repositories for
+documentation (all available on request).
+
+This computing facility has four computer racks dedicated to
+GeneNetwork related work. Each rack has a mix of Dell PowerEdge
+servers (from a few low-end R610s to high performance Dell R7425
+64-core systems - tux01 and tux02 - running the GeneNetwork web
+services), tux03 with 40 cores, 196 GB RAM and 2x NVIDIA V100 GPU, and
+one Computing Relion 2600GT systems - Penguin2 - with NVIDIA Tesla K40
+GPU which is used for software development and serves outside facing
+less-secure R/shiny and Python web services running in isolated
+containers. Effectively we have three decent outward facing servers
+which are fully utilized for the GeneNetwork project and OPAR with a
+total of 64+64+40+28=196 real cores. Furthermore we have a dedicated
+HPC cluster, named Octopus, consisting of 11 PowerEdge R6515 AMD EPYC
+7402P 24-Core (total 264 cores; 528 hyperthreaded). These machines
+have 128 GB RAM each. The two head nodes are large RAM machines with
+1TB each. All these machines run Debian + GNU Guix and use Slurm for
+batch submission.  The racks have dedicated high speed Cisco switches
+and firewalls which are maintained by UTHSC IT staff.
+
+We also run some 'specials' including an ARM-based NVIDIA Jetson and a
+RISC-V [PolarFire
+SOC](https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/07/20/polarfire-soc-icicle-64-bit-risc-v-and-fpga-development-board-runs-linux-or-freebsd/). We
+have also ordered two RISC-V
+[SiFive](https://www.sifive.com/blog/the-heart-of-risc-v-development-is-unmatched)
+computers.
+
+In addition to above hardware we have batch submission access to the
+cluster computing resource at the Advanced Computing Facility operated
+by the UT Joint Institute for Computational Sciences in a secure setup
+at the DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We have a 10 Gbit connection
+from the machine room at UTHSC to data transfer nodes at the ACF. The
+ACF has been upgraded in the past year (see [ACF system
+overview](http://www.nics.utk.edu/computing-resources/acf/acf-system-overview)
+and now has over 3 PB of high-performance Lustre DDN storage and
+contains over 8000 cores with some large RAM nodes and one GPU
+node. Drs. Prins and other team members have used ACF systems to
+analyze genomic and genetic data sets. In recent developments the ACF
+will be moved from ORNL to UT Knoxville in 2021.  We note that we can
+not use the ACF compute and storage facilities for public facing web
+services because of its stringent security requirements.  The ACF,
+however, may come in useful to precompute genomics and genetics
+analysis results using standardized pipelines.