Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on the North Shore of Long Island runs a world-renowned program in Genomics Research, the study of individual genomes. A substantial genomics effort funded largely by the Simons Foundation underway at CSHL is focused on autism. These CSHL scientists are developing and employing new technologies and software to scan and analyze genomes in an effort to understand the genetics of this disorder. A recent study focused on small-scale de novo mutations — changes in DNA as small as a single DNA “letter” relative to the normal sequence, and small insertions or deletions as large as 10 or 15 letters. The research team at CSHL found a striking link between the Fragile-X gene and mutations that cause autism. This autism research project utilizes some standard DNA sequencing analysis tools such as BWA for sequence mapping, GATK, SAMtools, etc, and then a number of custom programs for genotyping and copy-number analysis.
The Red Barn HPC systems that are being utilized for this research include 320 processing cores (Xeon X5690 and Xeon E5 2690), 4,352Gb of memory, and a Petabyte of local storage, accessible directly and via a parallel file system and interconnected with 10G networking. This much power across only 24 nodes enables the researchers to quickly process the large amounts of data necessary to enable their research.
Peter Andrews, Researcher at CSHL writes:
CSHL has worked with Red Barn since 2006. We chose Red Barn because of their price, and have stayed customers because of their service. We have experienced minimal failures, substantial up-time and system performance within our expectations.
A true end-to-end HPC solutions company, Red Barn's experts are available to advise on the latest technology and upgrade options as needed for CSHL to add to their computing power.
