Good to see a decent set of CAPI peripherals emerging. The presence of HMC on the mentioned IBM prototype is interesting; I've been very favorably impressed by the performance of HMC so far - gobs of memory bandwidth in a small physical footprint.
That's a meaningless statement. "Very expensive" for the casual user who thinks it might be a neat addition to his home PC is more than $100. "Very expensive" for a research lab that is processing genomes by the thousand might be more than, what, $100,000?
Of course the card costs money. The question is: what does it (and the associated POWER8 box) cost compared to the alternative.
Being into genomics myself, I'd be willing to be that at $130,000 Nvidia's DGX-1 server with 8 Tesla P100's would get the job done in less than an hour, cost less, and still be a general purpose machine to do other types of work on.
The DGX-1 is only 3U compared to (probably) 2U of the Dragen Genomics platform. So room really isn't much of an issue. Probably will go through more energy, but that's a negligible factor as these aren't being scaled to 100 nodes.
But really, having the machine be x86 and general purpose means that I can utilize those Pascal based Tesla's to do advanced DNA and molecular modeling, with the data that I get from analyzing the DNA in the first place which is all that the Dragen unit does. The article even says that its use-case is for situations where reconstructing sequenced DNA is the only thing that is needed. In a research environment, you'd go for the expensive computer that does lots of things, not the expensive computer that does one thing. The Dragen is really just a super-focused machine that only does a single thing, not for genomics research unless you happen to have an absurd amount of money to spend.
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SaolDan - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Neat!SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, April 12, 2016 - link
Good to see a decent set of CAPI peripherals emerging. The presence of HMC on the mentioned IBM prototype is interesting; I've been very favorably impressed by the performance of HMC so far - gobs of memory bandwidth in a small physical footprint.mosu - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link
What is the estimated cost of a Dragen Genomics platform? numbers please, if possible.Shadow7037932 - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link
If you don't see a price listed, it's probably very expensive.name99 - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link
That's a meaningless statement. "Very expensive" for the casual user who thinks it might be a neat addition to his home PC is more than $100. "Very expensive" for a research lab that is processing genomes by the thousand might be more than, what, $100,000?Of course the card costs money. The question is: what does it (and the associated POWER8 box) cost compared to the alternative.
Freakie - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link
Being into genomics myself, I'd be willing to be that at $130,000 Nvidia's DGX-1 server with 8 Tesla P100's would get the job done in less than an hour, cost less, and still be a general purpose machine to do other types of work on.tuxRoller - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
It'll also take up more room and blow through more energy.Freakie - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
The DGX-1 is only 3U compared to (probably) 2U of the Dragen Genomics platform. So room really isn't much of an issue. Probably will go through more energy, but that's a negligible factor as these aren't being scaled to 100 nodes.But really, having the machine be x86 and general purpose means that I can utilize those Pascal based Tesla's to do advanced DNA and molecular modeling, with the data that I get from analyzing the DNA in the first place which is all that the Dragen unit does. The article even says that its use-case is for situations where reconstructing sequenced DNA is the only thing that is needed. In a research environment, you'd go for the expensive computer that does lots of things, not the expensive computer that does one thing. The Dragen is really just a super-focused machine that only does a single thing, not for genomics research unless you happen to have an absurd amount of money to spend.
kirannmehta - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link
This---otherwise nice article---omits explicit mention of CAPI support by AIX