Scientific Computing

Mount Sinai has committed over $50M to its scientific computational and data cyberinfrastructure, recognizing that a well-designed and managed infrastructure empowers its scientists and researchers to be more productive and effective.  This significant investment includes professional staff, expertise, hardware, software and a new computational and data facility dedicated to scientific computing.

  
The computing and data center at Mount Sinai contains over 10,000 square-feet of space, expanded by the opening of a new 2,200 square-foot computer room facility (October 2012).
Mount Sinai’s resources were augmented with over 70 teraflops of peak compute power in 7,680 AMD 2.3 GHz Interlagos cores (April 2012).  Each of the 120 4-socket compute nodes will have 256 GB of memory, for a total system memory of 30 terabytes. The high performance compute cluster nodes will be connected with a high bandwidth, low latency Quad Data Rate Infiniband interconnect.  Additionally, there will be 1.5 petabytes of high performance parallel file system storage.

Mount Sinai has several complementary resources, including an SGI Altix 1300 cluster with 816 CPU cores, 64 Nehalem-class nodes with Quad Data Rate (QDR) Infiniband connectivity and 38 nodes with Double Data Rate (DDR) Infiniband.  All of those nodes are attached to 65 Terabytes of Lustre-based high-speed shared storage.  The software and programming environments are the best of breed, and include community standards such as Linux and MPI.  The clusters also run resource managers and schedulers optimized for the job workload, and to process as many jobs as possible for the highest overall machine utilization, job throughput and job success rate.  The clusters are operated with over 95% uptime, using scalable and reproducible configuration management techniques.  The machines are also monitored for security.

  
Mount Sinai’s robust computing and data cyberinfrastructure has been designed for the rapid and accurate ingest of the sequencer output, and high performance post-processing and analysis by the computational and storage insfrastructure.  The cyberinfrastructure resources have been tailored specifically to handle the computational and data workflow from the sequencer, including a high bandwidth network to the high performance computing and data facilities.

Mount Sinai closely collaborates and partners with other facilities and vendors to keep its cyberinfrastructure and services state-of-the-art. The staff follow the communities’ best practices and procedures to ensure that the computing and data services are the most efficient and effective for the researchers.

  
For more information:
Visit:  HPC.mssm.edu
Email:  patricia.kovatch@mssm.edu
Last Update:  March 23, 2012