Our Assets: Children’s Mercy Hospitals

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Technical Expertise

Hardware/Software Assets

The Core of Genetic Research, directed by Dr. Shui Qing Ye, is equipped with a compute cluster (Advanced Computer Clustering, Inc., Kansas City, KS).  There is one head node with six compute nodes installed in a dedicated rack with room for several more nodes. It comprises a 96-core cluster with 384GB of DDR3 RAM and 48TB SATA hard drives (6 x dual 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 “Sandy Bridge” 2.6GHz processors), Quantum SuperLoader3 2U 16 tape library for backups. It is located within a dedicated data center with environmental controls, conditioned power, and hospital emergency back-up power. Deployed on the cluster are the latest versions of GATK, CASAVA, Bowtie, TopHat, Cufflinks, R with CummeRbund, Python with NumPy and SciPy, BreakDancer, Plink, and Haploview software applications.

Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine, directed by Neil Miller, has five full time bioinformatics/IT staff.  The Center’s compute resources are located within a dedicated data center with environmental controls, 15 tons of air conditioning, conditioned power, hospital emergency back-up power and 45kVa UPS capability. The compute resources comprise a 608-core Linux compute cluster with 6TB of DDR3 RAM and 20TB SATA hard drives (20 x 12-core Intel Xeon X5670, 8 x 16-core Intel Xeon E5-2650 and 12 x 20-core Intel Xeon E5-2660 ), redundant head nodes (12-core Intel Xeon X5670 with 48GB RAM and 500GB SATA drive), a pipeline server (12-core Intel Xeon X5670 with 96GB RAM and 1TB SATA hard drive), Isilon X400 storage system with 810TB usable capacity, SGI Infinite Storage Gateway disaster recovery and backup appliance with 160TB usable capacity, Spectra Logic T950 tape library with 2.4PB uncompressed usable capacity, redundant web servers (12-core Intel Xeon X5670 with 48GB RAM and 500GB SATA drive), and database server (12-core Intel Xeon X5670 with 96GB RAM and 16TB SATA drives) on which are deployed the LIMS, GATK, GSNAP, CASAVA, SSAGA, CMH variant warehouse, RUNES and VIKING software systems. The data center is adjacent to the room housing the DNA sequencers, which also features environmental controls to maintain ambient temperature at 65 degrees C, conditioned power, hospital emergency back-up power and substantial UPS capability.