Computing resources

The IT resources in the Laboratoire de Biochimie Théorique have evolved considerably in recent years. This reflects the inherent increase in calculation demands of the laboratory and the renewal of the IT team, and follows particularly the awards of numerous European and national endowments including the ERC "Thermos", the ERC "ABIOS", the Labex "Dynamo", and several ANR grants.

Indeed, since 2011, the Laboratoire de Biochimie Théorique has built and hosted 3 high performance computing clusters (HPCCs) , the first 2 of which were dismantled to make room for the 3rd one:

  • Hades (2011-2012) -dismantled-: HPCC composed of 29x bi Intel Xeon X5650 (Westmere microarchitecture) nodes totalising 1.2TB of RAM (~4GB per core) and up to ~3.7 CPU TFLOPS (FP64)

  • Lucifer (2013-2014) -dismantled- : HPCC composed of 28x bi AMD Opteron 6380 (Abu Dhabi microarchitecture) nodes totalising 896GB of RAM (1GB per core) and up to ~9.2 CPU TFLOPS (FP64)

  • Baal (from 2015 till now): HPCC, which totals ~3.6TB of RAM and can reach ~41 CPU TFLOPS (FP64) and be accelerated by 985 GPU TFLOPS (FP32) / 25.1 GPU TFLOPS (FP64), is composed by:

    • 2x bi Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 (Ivy Bridge microarchitecture) nodes for post-processing jobs

    • 3x bi Intel Xeon E5-2650v3 (Ivy Bridge microarchitecture) / bi Nvidia GeForce GTX-1080Ti nodes

    • 10x bi Intel Xeon E5-2698v4 (Broadwell microarchitecture) / bi Nvidia GeForce GTX-1080Ti nodes.

    • 2x bi Intel Xeon E5-2698v4 (Broadwell microarchitecture) / bi Nvidia GeForce GTX-4070 nodes.

    • 1x bi Intel Xeon Gold 6230 (Cascade Lake microarchitecture) / bi Nvidia GeForce RTX-2080Ti nodes.

    • 3x bi Intel Xeon Gold 5218R (Cascade Lake microarchitecture) / bi Nvidia GeForce RTX-3080 nodes.

    • 1x bi Intel Xeon Gold 5218R (Cascade Lake microarchitecture) / bi Nvidia GeForce RTX-3080Ti node.

    • 1x bi Intel Xeon Gold 5220R (Cascade Lake microarchitecture) / bi Nvidia GeForce RTX-A6000 node.

    • 4x bi Intel Xeon Gold 5218R (Cascade Lake microarchitecture) / bi Nvidia GeForce RTX-A5000 node.

These computing resources are equipped with corresponding storage volumes appropriate to the required calculation intensity:

  • 384TB raw of computing storage volume

  • 336TB raw of archive volume (deduplicated and compressed data)

  • ~43TB useful of temporary computing space

Since our financial allocations are limited, and for better project control, we have fully designed and deployed these computing and storage ressources with open-source solutions by home-made way.

Our server room, located on the 3rd floor of the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, has been completely redesigned to accommodate these HPCCs, our lab information system, and related services for other labs in the Institute (IBPC's Information System included).

The following schema provides a short introduction to our IT infrastructure and services.

For more information about our computing resources (for both info and use guide), you can access the dedicated wiki.