Bottom-Up Virtualization

Working in the life sciences industry, I often deal with users who have requests that might be considered strange in other fields. For example, my organization has users asking for systems with 2 terabytes of RAM. We have other users asking for systems with 12 terabytes of RAM. To a normal system administrator who doesn’t run OLTP systems for a bank or brokerage, where you might find huge-memory database systems, this technical requirement seems silly. However, for gene sequence assembly and analysis, this much memory is really a requirement with longer sequences. Short read assemblers like Velvet can chew through … Continue Reading →