It’s no exaggeration to say that GenomeDK is growing in almost all aspects, in particular thanks to our very productive and dedicated user base, and substantial extra funding from DeiC and the Ministry of Higher Education and Science.
In this newsletter we will explore the changes that have already happened, and are going to happen, in 2023.
Queues have been long-ish and you have been waiting longer than usual for your jobs to run. Why? In the past years we have retired lots and lots of old compute nodes to make space for future expansions. At the same time activity has increased.
We’re happy to announce that we have now accepted an offer from Danoffice/Lenovo for the largest expansion of compute capacity that we have ever had – by a large margin.
To be precise, 11520 cores will be added to GenomeDK! To put this into context, our largest purchase so far was 3400 cores.
While this is exciting in and by itself, there’s much more to this purchase than we can write here. You’ll hear more later.
Two-factor authentication (2FA) comes in many forms. The most well known is probably 2FA where one factor is a username/password pair, and the other factor is an authentication token or approval provided by a smartphone app. Users on our closed zones have used 2FA with an authentication token for a long time, while the second factor for users on the open zone has been IP whitelisting.
In the coming months, we will unify our 2FA setup. This means that all users on the open zone will be migrated to the authentication token-based 2FA (some will know this as TOTP-based 2FA), meaning that you will need a smartphone with an authenticator app (or some other device that understands TOTP and can generate tokens for you).
The change will be rolled out gradually. You do not have to do anything right now. You will receive further instructions when your user is ready to be migrated.
… is good news, but to be able to provide you with more regular updates, official announcements, and technical posts, we’ve introduced a news section on our website (you’re looking at it right now!). Check out this space for future news. You can also still follow us on Twitter (or X or whatever it’s called today).
In the last newsletter we covered the arrival of the hardware for our latest storage expansion. The expansion was put into production on July 4th and has been running smooth like butter ever since. The total storage capacity of the storage system is now 23 PB and we currently host 14 PB of data.
We will give a full-day introduction to GenomeDK and computing on a HPC system on the first day of the recently announced Single cell and spatial OMICS PhD course headed by Lin Lin at the Faculty of Health.
If you’re an employee at AU, we strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with the excellent data protection resources published by the AU Information Security department. The resources are a good introduction to GDPR and your responsibilities as an AU employee/student.
We still have a few GenomeDK mugs left (only the “formal” style though - sorry!). You’re welcome to pop by our office and grab an exclusive first-edition mug. Got ideas for new merch? Get in touch.
That’s it for now. If you have any questions or comments, as always, contact us at support@genome.au.dk.
Anders and Dan
The GenomeDK Team