Lenovo's ANZ MD, Matt Codrington
The University of Melbourne's Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI) has used Lenovo to upgrade its systems into life science computation, such as cancer, microbial and plant and animal genomics.
The new Lenovo x86 cluster, nicknamed 'Snowy' replaces the 7 teraflop 'Merri', and now operates at 30 teraflops per second, pushing the department's total capacity to 50 teraflops - vital for the high strain workloads the university demands. It has been specifically tuned by Lenovo to match the observed usage patterns of researchers.
Already several high profile projects are ready to move over to Snowy: The Peter Doherty Centre for Applied Microbial Genomics, the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance and a partnership between the Cancer Council Victoria and the University of Melbourne’s Genetic Epidemiology Laboratory.
“We’re thrilled to be part of such important advancements in, say, cancer detection and diagnosis,” said Matt Codrington, Managing Director, Lenovo Australia and New Zealand.
Snowy will take very large single-application workloads which can utilise the entire computational capacity of the cluster, as well as many smaller workloads, which may run in parallel.
“At Lenovo, our team is dedicated to innovation that helps improve lives and we can think of no better way to use our technology than by providing the tools for the VLSCI to conduct life-saving research. We hope this is the first in many such partnerships with the VLSCI as we continue to work together to make data analytics work hard for healthcare applications," he said.
The project was funded by the Victorian Government and its contributors.
