Scientific Computing Services

With the experience of building one of the largest private computing infrastructures for Genomics research, the team at Compass has the expertise to solve your biggest computational problems. Compass can help you use grid computing and Linux/Unix as state-of-the-art tools to solve genomics, proteomics, weather modeling and other difficult scientific problems.

As Apple and Dell VARs, Compass has access to some of the most powerful commodity compute equipment on the market. The team at Compass has more than ten years of experience in building solutions that solve real science problems. It is this hands-on experience with the hardware and the software that makes scientific computing work that Compass can bring to your specific problems.

The Compass team has built and deployed:

A $30M bioinformatics computing infrastructure — one of the top three privately held biotech infrastructures in the world.
Two heterogeneous computational grids linked between two different sites with 100+ processors per grid.
A high-availability NAS resource for the computational resources.
Created scientific workflow software that solved real problems.
Created web-based scientific applications that made information easily accessible to all researchers in the client’s corporation.

At Compass we feel that there are no “one-size-fits-all” solutions to your challenges. We have the experience to use the tools and technologies available today to solve your scientific research and development problems.

Apple VAR

As an Apple Scientific VAR, Compass can provide your research and development teams access to the most cost-effective, high-powered, cluster-based computing technologies. By using IBM's innovative PowerPC processor with its 64-bit multiprocessor architecture capable of addressing 8GB of RAM, the XServe G5 is perfect for your HPC projects. In addition, the lower operating temperatures of Apple’s XServe hardware allows larger numbers of high-performance servers to be supported in a smaller space and with lower electrical and air conditioning requirements. The Apple XServe RAID can provide over 5TB of data storage in just 3U of space. The XServe RAID uses high speed high capacity serial ATA drives instead of more expensive and lower density SCSI drives.

Dell VAR

Dell’s High-Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) combines multiple Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) computer systems together with high-speed interconnects to achieve the raw-computing power of classic "big-iron" supercomputers. With Dell's 64-bit Intel Xeon based servers such as the PowerEdge SC1425, PowerEdge 1850 and PowerEdge 1855, it has become more practical to build parallel computational systems from low-cost, high-density servers.

High-Performance GRID Computing

The newest technique in high-performance computing is to use many smaller commodity servers linked together into a grid forming a virtual supercomputer. This requires sophisticated networking and scheduling software in addition to the hardware. With many different approaches from Beowolf clusters to compute farms using LSF, SGE or Xgrid, it is hard to know exactly which solution is best. Compass can help you navigate the world of GRID computing and build a solution best suited to your needs.

Load Sharing Facility

LSF is the industry's most powerful and comprehensive family of grid-enabled solutions by Platform. It helps manage and optimize expensive and complex IT environments delivering higher IT efficiency, faster time to business results, dramatically reduced cost of computing and guaranteed service execution. LSF fully utilizes all IT resources regardless of operating system, including desktops, servers and mainframes to ensure policy-driven, prioritized service levels for always-on access to resources.

Grid Engine

The Grid Engine project is an open source community effort to facilitate the adoption of distributed computing solutions. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems and hosted by CollabNet, the Grid Engine project provides enabling distributed resource management software for wide ranging requirements from compute farms to grid computing.

Xgrid

Xgrid turns a group of Apple XServe computers into a supercomputer, so they can work on problems greater than each individually could solve. Xgrid uses zero configuration Rendezvous to discover available resources, so you never have to enter IP addresses to set up a cluster. It can even take advantage of the idle desktop systems in your company to increase the capability of the cluster. Xgrid takes the grunt work out of splitting jobs and collecting results. Many scientists who already use command line tools in their work will immediately be able to take advantage of Xgrid and have the power of a cluster without the hassle of setup.

Apple Reseller

Bioinformatics

The Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics provides a faster, easier and lower-cost path to scientific discovery. Based on the Apple Xserve G5 cluster configuration, this all-inclusive bundle includes over 170 open source bioinformatics applications, like BLAST and HMMER, and all the tools and support you need to quickly get a cluster up and running.