Large Scale Computing and Storage Requirements for Biological and Environmental Research

In May 2009, NERSC, DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), and DOE's Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) held a workshop to characterize HPC requirements for BER-funded research over the subsequent three to five years. The workshop revealed several key points, in addition to achieving its goal of collecting and characterizing computing requirements. Chief among them: scientific progress in BER-funded research is limited by current allocations of computational resources. Additionally, growth in mission-critical computing -- combined with new requirements for collaborative data manipulation and analysis -- will demand ever increasing computing, storage, network, visualization, reliability and service richness from NERSC. This report expands upon these key points and adds others. It also presents a number of "case studies" as significant representative samples of the needs of science teams within BER. Workshop participants were asked to codify their requirements in this "case study" format, summarizing their science goals, methods of solution, current and 3-5 year computing requirements, and special software and support needs. Participants were also asked to describe their strategy for computing in the highly parallel, "multi-core" environment that is expected to dominate HPC architectures over the next few years