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Re: Debian's use in the Human Genome Project mentioned in the The Guardian




On 12 Mar 2008, at 8:15 am, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 04:28:31PM +0000, Tim Cutts wrote:
Just thought you might like to read that as a break from the flame wars.

Thanks, this kind of interruptions have indeed chance of breaking
flamewars :-)

However, you might be interested in http://times.debian.net, it is an
"advertisement" place, blog-like, for this kind of "good news" about
Debian. It reported about the very same news a couple of days ago:
http://times.debian.net/1225-Sanger-Institute-Debian-cluster-320-TB-swap-1.5-PB-storage .

I do find Tony's description of it as "swap" a bit odd. I run the thing, and I don't think of it as swap! It's more like /tmp; a holding area for the raw image data from the sequencers, before it's processed down to a more manageable form for long term storage. 320TB is enough for two weeks' raw data, at the current resolution and experimental procedure. It'll drop to one week when they double the per-experiment data output later this year...

To be quite frank this stuff gives us, the admins, the screaming heebie-jeebies, but in a fun way. The scientists have some really fantastic ideas coming down the line, but the IT to support them is quite a challenge! We're always on the lookout for people to join the team - if anyone's interested in seriously large scale computing with Debian and has good ideas for how to deal with petabytes of data and thousands of CPUs, we want to hear from you! All areas are of interest; SAN storage, networking, cluster filesystems, automating systems administration, self-healing systems, interoperability with Windows and Mac OS X, scientific code optimisation, you name it, we have to deal with it.

Tim


--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
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