Supercomputer

Supercomputer system "SHIROKANE", which is managed by Human Genome Center of IMSUT, is designed suitably for data science and is utilized by a number of researchers in universities, research institutes and companies as a foundation of life science researches in Japan. A lot of computer programs frequently used in life science researches are already installed, and the SHIROKANE users are able to start their analyses immediately. SHIROKANE enables users to analyze life science big data including whole genome sequence data and other omics data and to perform deep learning for artificial intelligence and ultra high-speed computation by cutting-edge GPU system.
 
As of April 1st, 2020, SHIROKANE is composed of two systems; Shirokane5 (started from Apr 2017) and Shirokane4 (started from Apr 2019). Shirokane5 is composed of distributed memory server with 13,176 CPU cores (3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Gold), GPU server with 80 NVIDIA Tesla V100 and large memory server with 3 Tera Byte memory/node for genome sequence data analysis, data science, deep learning for Artificial Intelligence, de novo assembly and other computations. Shirokane4 has 3,440 CPU cores and 18 Peta Byte high-speed disk array system "Lustre" and large-scale archive, which can be extended by 100 Peta Byte, for storing data with low cost.
 
To accelerate life science researches by these computational resources, Human Genome Center manages the SHIROKANE system from a user’s standpoint and makes efforts to create user-friendly services.