Opening of the GDC share on Euler cluster !

We are happy to announce the opening of the GDC share on the big ETH cluster Euler!

Euler is a very powerful computing cluster with almost 30'000 fast CPUs and lots of RAM and disk space.    
Thanks to a grant by the Scientific Equipment Program the GDC became Euler shareholder earlier this year. We have now installed and tested about 60 software tools in addition to the many that were already available. And more are being installed constantly or can be installed on request.

Advantages of using Euler are:
- very fast CPUs: up to 2x faster than the CPUs on our servers
- high peak CPU usage possible: up to 80 CPUs per user for short periods
- fast disks and networks, speeding up many tasks
- compute nodes with up to 3TB of RAM

From our own experience we can report:
-> big BLAST jobs (several ten thousand sequences against NCBI protein DB): done in days
-> big freebayes SNP-calling jobs (dozens to hundreds of samples): done in days instead of weeks.
-> phylogenetic analyses with RAxML on very big data sets: done in days instead of weeks.  

We now invite you all to start doing your bioinformatics analyses on Euler too!
Please contact us if you are interested. We can then provide you with information on how to take advantage of the GDC Euler share.


Future development of GDC bioinformatics computing:
For some time we will keep our own servers open and up to date, but eventually all projects will switch to Euler. The actual time frame is still open and depends on a number of factors. Currently, we expect to shut down some of the old servers within the next 12 months and to do the full switch within the next 24 months. Therefore, we will start installing new projects on Euler wherever possible. We also advise to put all newly incoming big data sets (in particular NGS data) on Euler and to start doing the heavy computing on Euler.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions or if you need further information.