FishOS powers the Eberhard Karls University cloud, providing a cloud environment for bioinformaticians through the university computing center in Tübingen.
The German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure, or in short »de.NBI«, is a national research infrastructure providing bioinformatics services to users in life sciences research, biomedicine, and related fields. Through a cloud federation concept, all five de.NBI sites, Bielefeld Uni, Freiburg Uni, Tübingen Uni, Heidelberg Uni, and Giessen Uni, are integrated into a single cloud platform. As a result, the user will be guided to the envisaged service and the suitable cloud via the central de.NBI cloud portal.
Sardina FishOS forms the backbone of de.NBI Cloud, to facilitate advanced European scientific discoveries. The highly reliable platform based on OpenStack and Ceph enables integrative analyses and efficient use of data towards scientific breakthroughs.
The objective
de.NBI’s multiple systems combine FishOS OpenStack and Ceph to provide ultra-reliable platforms for traditional research and next-gen applications, with data security and protection.
To achieve de.NBI’s purposes the critical requirements for Ceph storage included: geo-redundancy over multiple sites, encryption-at-rest, asynchronous mirroring, choice of uni-directional or bi-directional mirroring. The systems support multiple storage and per-pool configurations, for both snapshot and journal modes of mirroring, and for snapshots set up to take them at scheduled times.
So as to accelerate computations, the cloud platform features advanced Nvidia GPU acceleration.
With multiple OpenStack-based and Ceph-based clouds spanning multiple locations and regions, the systems’ day-to-day operation is made simple and flexible, with pre-integrated operations tools for the cloud platform, with smart predictive analytics and intelligent resource management.
FishOS solution
Sardina implemented a solution design, based on FishOS’ operational architecture, allowing de.NBI to manage the multiple systems with fully automated, flexible, reliable, and scalable operations, and a market-unique Zero-Downtime upgrade. Today, de.NBI runs four systems with a FishOS solution based on OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph. Sardina also migrated one of the systems from Ubuntu OpenStack.
The FishOS solution architecture is flexible to scale data storage, provide elastic compute service resources, deliver automated resource management, ease networking, and guarantees data analytics availability.
FishOS self-service automated cloud technology enables high availability by default, delivers intelligent self-healing operations, seamless rolling upgrades, scaling to thousands of servers, improving utilization, addressing security, and lowering costs. The de.NBI cloud powered by FishOS enables integrative analyses for the European life sciences community and the efficient use of data in research and application, with optimized TCO.
The benefits
- Automated zero-click operations
- Optimized TCO: 10x lower OpEx&CapEx
- Data security and protection
- Increased resilience and flexibility
- Elastic pay as you grow economics
- Easily build large-scale systems extending to multiple sites
de.NBI Cloud: Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen – A federated and georedundant solution for large scientific data
FishOS powers the cloud at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. FishOS provides a cloud environment for bioinformaticians through the university computing center in Tübingen. Firstly, it includes infrastructure, various workflow solutions to construct pipelines, and tools with a particular focus on the analysis of high-throughput data (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.).
Secondly, one major aim of the de.NBI cloud site in Tübingen is to provide software, covering different scientific fields of research such as mass spectrometry analysis, NGS analysis pipelines but also molecular docking via Ball integrated into Galaxy workflows (galaxy).
FishOS eases the day-to-day operation of the Tubingen University’s systems making it simple and flexible thanks to its pre-integrated operations tools for the cloud platform. The systems’ users benefit from smart predictive analytics and intelligent resource management.
de.NBI cloud: Justus-Liebig-University (JLU) Giessen
FishOS powers the de.NBI cloud infrastructure at Justus-Liebig-University (JLU) Giessen. This was successfully established in early 2017, providing large-scale computing and storage resources to users of the de.NBI network. An extension of the overall storage capacity is already underway and will be available in the first half of 2018.
After initial setup and intensive testing, the cloud at JLU Giessen was transferred to production mode in June 2017. It has already been used successfully to conduct practical sessions during the first de.NBI summer school on cloud computing for bioinformatics.
On this occasion, 24 participants applied cloud computing techniques for the analysis of their own biological data sets. They learned how to implement scalable bioinformatics software solutions in a cloud environment. Since its establishment, the cloud is regularly used by various cooperation partners and users of the de.NBI network to analyze their data.
The computing resources for running virtual machines are complemented by a selection of various storage solutions, including SSD-based ephemeral disks, data volumes, and object storage, which can be used to store raw and intermediate data as well as the final results of bioinformatics analysis pipelines.