I work for the Norwegian High-Throughput Sequencing Centre (NSC), but at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES). At CEES, numerous researchers run bioinformatic analyses, or other computation-heavy analyses, for their projects. With this post, I want to describe the infrastructure we use for calculations and storage, and the reason why we chose to set these up the way we did.
In general, when one needs high-performance compute (HPC) infrastructure, a (group of) researcher(s) can purchase these and locate them in or around the office, or use a cloud solution. Many, if not most, universities offer a computer cluster for their researchers’ analysis needs. We chose a hybrid model between the universitys HPC infrastructure and setting up one ourselves. In other words, our infrastructure is a mix of self-owned, and shared resources that we either apply for, or rent.
In between lines of code 