Solve for X, where X is too big – QBI's HPC storage problems & our adventures in Infiniband-land with the NetApp E-Series technology 

The Queensland Brain Institute is well known as a scientific research institute where high end computing infrastructure goes to die, such is the aggression, force and intensity of some of it's extremely computationally capable researchers.

As QBI's scientists grapple with the world-wide and seemingly insurmountable problems of ageing, dementia, autism, epilepsy and other debilitative disorders, all the while, high performance computing infrastructure is breaking under the weight of the computationally complex genomics, neuro-scientific and engineering related problems that are trying to be solved.

QBI was in fairly serious trouble in terms of it's high performance computing scratch disk given some of the unusual scale and ferocity of newly developed workloads and statistical analysis techniques within specific fields of genomics.

This presentation documents QBI's journey with NetApp's E-Series technology to achieve something special, breaking through the previous performance ceiling that was constraining research outcomes, learning along the way about some of the eccentricities of Infiniband technologies and confronting the true face of big data at the cutting edge of high intensity life sciences research computing.