The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has awarded the Institute of Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with a shared memory supercomputer named Ember, which the university will use for computational genomics and transcriptomics research.
Ember will be managed by the IGB's high-performance biological computing group. The two-year old system was previously part of the NCSA but was decommissioned in October. It has been installed at IGB, adding 1,536 cores and eight terabytes of memory to an existing cluster at the center.
IGB's researchers have used Ember for some genomics projects in the past while it was under NCSA, according to Victor Jongeneel, HPCBio's director.
Now, "having it under our own management will allow us better access and faster results," he said in a statement. "It can perform a lot of tasks that our existing systems just can't."
Ember will be available for on-campus use for an undisclosed service fee that will be placed in a fund that will be used to replace the infrastructure as it ages, U of I said.