Scripps Florida

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In his 1884 studies of the genetics of peas, Gregor Mendel did his ground-breaking calculations by hand, recording the results in a notebook. Today, a typical experiment at Scripps Florida generates hundreds of gigabytes of data, where the information can only be extracted using state-of-the-art information technology. Modern analysis software in combination with grid technology masters the task in minutes. That’s why Scripps Florida depends on Sun's computing technology.

When Scripps Florida was established, it had a green-field opportunity to establish a computing platform. A large number of companies initially bid for the project, but the competition quickly narrowed to three major IT vendors, including Sun.

Performance was a top consideration. Instead of relying on generic benchmark data, Scripps Florida set up strenuous tests at the Sun Solution Center for High Performance Computing using real-world biomedical applications and data. Sun came out on top, besting competitors by up to 15 percent. That result, combined with a broader offering of services, tipped the scales toward Sun. “Three companies ran our benchmarks, and Sun emerged as the clear winner with its x64-based servers. And performance played a big part in our decision to go with Sun,” says Joel Zysman, Director of Scientific Computing at Scripps Florida.

Then Sun Customer Ready Systems Program went to work. The institute had anticipated a 30-day onsite assembly phase, but Sun shaved it to four hours: Scripps Florida literally wheeled the preconfigured, pretested racks into the data center, plugged them in and started running research applications.

Now research at Scripps Florida is conducted on a high-performance computing grid of 98 Sun Fire V20z servers, each with two AMD Opteron processors. One additional Sun Fire V20z server acts as the Sun control station server across the cluster. The Sun N1 Grid Engine software, hosted on two Sun Fire V40z servers, manages the grid. A Sun StorageTek 5310 NAS Appliance provides three terabytes of primary storage space.

Grid performance has exceeded expectations. Baseline utilization is 65 percent, with peaks of full capacity. In the first year, only one server suffered downtime, and was back online within four hours—better than 99.998 percent server availability. The x64 servers cut energy bills, and because they run cooler, can be packed closer, saving space.

Administrative applications are less glamorous than biomedical research, but equally important to running the institute. Scripps Florida’s primary Oracle 10g database runs on a pair of Sun Fire V890 servers. A second instance of Oracle 10g is hosted on two Sun Fire T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology and Solaris 10 OS, taking advantage of Oracle’s preferential licensing fees for multicore servers and reducing energy costs. “The price/performance ratio running Oracle 10g on the Sun Fire T2000 server is simply phenomenal,” says Zysman.

Twenty-five Sun Fire V20z and two Sun Fire V40z servers host other back-office applications, while three Sun StorageTek 3510 FC and two Sun StorageTek 3511 SATA arrays provide 15 terabytes of storage. Veritas NetBackup running on a Sun Fire V490 server backs up data to a Sun StorageTek L500 tape library. Scripps Florida purchased a SunSpectrum Silver Service Plan and uses Sun for training on NetBackup, Solaris 9 and 10 operating systems and the Sun N1 Grid Engine. “The quality of Sun technology and local support allows us to sleep well at night,” says Anthony Carvalloza, Lead Systems Analyst at Scripps Florida.

As Scripps Florida charts a future with triple the number of researchers—from 150 in 2006 to more than 500 by 2010—it will continue to count on Sun technology to support its pioneering scientific research.