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University of Connecticut Health Center - Know Better Care Richard D. Berlin
Center for Cell Analysis & Modeling

CCAM Computational Facility

Hardware Resources

Our facility is a reflection of the rapid growth of computational biology at CCAM. We started in 1999 with an 8-node compute cluster and a small fileserver that supported the Virtual Cell project and was located in an office extension. We have now grown to two dedicated environmentally-controlled server rooms housing a variety of hardware resources, currently with >5 TFlops compute power, >220 TB storage, and Terascale switching bandwidth that is undergoing continuous expansion.

Compute Clusters Research DMZ
Shared Storage Dedicated Servers
Managed Switches Environmental Control

 

Compute Clusters

A mix of older and newer architectures:

Alpha Cluster

  • Originally a 16 CPU BeoWulf cluster of Compaq DS-20 servers running True64 Unix
  • The oldest component of our resource, and at present partially decommissioned

Current Production Clusters

  • A 422 CPU cluster of Dell PowerEdge 1855, 1955, M600 blades, and Dell R815 servers running Rocks Cluster 5.3 x64 for Virtual Cell production
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Shared Storage

Apart from the storage resources of compute clusters and specialized servers, we currently have several high-capacity scalable shared storage systems supporting CIFS, NFS, and Appletalk:

  • An Isilon clustered storage system of 14 IQ 200 nodes for 28 TB of storage
  • An Isilon clustered storage system of 5 IQ 9000x nodes for 45 TB of storage
  • An Isilon clustered storage system of 5 36NL nodes for 162 TB of storage"
  • An iSCSI SAN with >28 TB of RAID enclosures, 2 switches, 3 front-end servers (one dedicated - Bill Mohler)
  • A SpectraData T50e Tape Library system for archival storage with 30TB of tape storage (expandable to 150TB)
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CCAM HPC

CCAM Events Calendar

Facility Director

Ion I. Moraru
moraru@panda.uchc.edu
860-679-2908

System Administrator

Jeff Dutton
jdutton@neuron.uchc.edu
860-679-7899

Contact Information

Please contact Ion Moraru with programmatic issues or to explore possible collaborations.

Please contact Jeff Dutton to report problems or for routine technical help. CCAM microscope and computer accounts and CAM domain account administration are also handled by Jeff.

Managed Switches
  • 26 Class 2 and Class 3 managed switches
  • >888 Gb ports and >50 10Gb ports
  • 3 HiGig links (10 Gbs) interconnecting switches dedicated to the RLX blade cluster
  • 2 Force10 C300 modular switches for cluster, core, and storage cluster switching infrastructure upgrade
  • 10GbE connectivity between cluster compute node central switch, core switch, TGC compute cluster nodes, and the three Isilon storage clusters
  • Data Center wide private network for secure server-to-server connectivity and monitoring of secure systems
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Research DMZ
  • A network external to the UCHC network to facilitate Virtual Cell production on the Open Science Grid
  • Dedicated redundant firewalls and switching equipment managed by the UCHC Network Infrastructure team for CCAM
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Dedicated Servers

Several specialized servers that make up the Virtual Cell back-end Infrastructure:

  • 3 Database servers running Oracle and JDBC services
  • 1 Messaging server running SonicMQ
  • Distributed services for RMI, Data, Compile/link, Management across 14 nodes

Several specialized servers for Enterprise Computing support, among which:

  • 5 Active Directory Domain Controllers for domains cam.uchc.edu, ccam.uchc.edu, and vcell.uchc.edu with DNS – one Active Directory Domain Controller and two DNS servers in the Research DMZ.
  • 1 VPN servers and 1 DHCP server
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Environmental Control
  • 70 tons of cooling in two Data Center’s monitored 24/7 by environmental temperature/humidity probes
  • 36 power strips, of which 24 are managed power strips controllable via HTTP and SNMP
  • A total of 140kW of UPS via three 40kW subsystems and an 80KW subsystem all with redundant power modules
  • Two Cat5E KVM over IP systems for remote server management
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