MBI’s Computational Core

The Computational Core provides infrastructure for computation, storage, networking and scientific software services and support for the Mechanobiology Institute.

Core Mission

MBI’s computational core facility was created to store, process, analyze and visualize experimental data and images as well as large scale computer modeling of cell processing and data mining of complex biological processes. As MBI has moved to a new research space without any preexisting IT facilities, major efforts were taken to design, acquire, install and configure the IT infrastructure.

The Mechanobiology Institute employs imaging technology to acquire biological data sets as a core component of their research. A single image data set may be several TB in size and is often acquired as individual files resulting in many thousands of files per experiment that must be stored, processed, analyzed and visualized. The Mechanobiology Institute houses multiple microscopes that can each generate large continuous streams of new data. Thus a fast, efficient and reliable network, storage and computational infrastructure is critical to support our research activities. Having a local data centre to house this computational equipment is the optimal way to provide necessary services and support for our scientists.

Facilities

MBI’s core IT infrastructure is currently composed of the following basic components.

Network: IT Core provides high-speed network connectivity between servers, storage, microscope and end users. MBI’s network consists of:

an InfiniBand network providing 56Gb/s(scalable to 100Gb/s) for Storage communication between servers
1Gbps, 10Gbps transfer rate from end users to centralized storage
40GbE core network with plans to scale up to 100GbE
100GbE connectivity between MBI & NSCC

Storage: MBI IT operates a high-performance parallel storage system providing large capacity and highly reliable storage. The Core also manages a medium sized SAN and software-based storage for low priority data. Our storage system features:

GPFS based high-performance parallel storage providing 1.6PB of storage, scalable up to 3PB of capacity, providing 10Gbps of data transfer
400TB of SAN managed with latest cluster and ILM technologies
200TB of low cost software-based storage to support low-priority data

High-performance computing: A set of high-performance GPU servers equipped by latest NVIDIA P100 & V100(NVLink) and several large memory servers. Our GPU compute servers provide:

Double-Precision performance: 50 teraFLOPS
Single-Precision performance: 100 teraFLOPS
Deep Learning performance: 574.8 teraFLOPS

Altogether, our compute servers consist of 224 CPU cores and 1.5 TB of main memory.

In addition, the MBI IT Core provides the MBI community with a diverse set of both commercial and Open Source software applications for image processing, database mining, computer modeling, bioinformatics and genomics, archival storage, etc., along with a fully-trained staff of IT professionals with expertise in systems design, implementation and management and application development, and an independent web presence and network for inter- and intranets.

Location

mbi.nus.edu.sg
mbi@nus.edu.sg
+65 6872 6123

Mechanobiology Institute, National University of Singapore
Level 5 T-Lab
National University of Singapore
5A Engineering Drive 1
Singapore 117411

Campus map

MBI IT Core Helpdesk

MBI staff using the MBI network can find the MBI IT Core Helpdesk at itcore.mbi.nus.edu.sg. Access the facilities booking system, download software and licenses, find how-tos, tutorials and more.