Breed4Food, a consortium of animal breeding companies and the Animal Breeding and Genomics Centre of Wageningen UR all situated in the Netherlands, initiated the High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster.

The expectation is that the presence of the HPC cluster in Wageningen will result, next to the primary use, in more collaboration and interaction between different disciplines and sectors in for instance the development and implementation of software applications, services and support.

Bernard de Geus, director of Breed4Food, sees the opening of the HPC as an important step in the research field of animal breeding and a striking example of public-private partnerships between companies and universities.

He said: "The development in science and technology is accelerating. For all parties, it is important to have access to such a shared facility, that allows the researchers to closely work together. New scientific insights are more quickly translated into innovation within companies this way."

Addie Vereijken, Research geneticist of Hendrix Genetics Research Technology, has already worked with the HPC.

He added: “The HPC is 1,000 times faster than a normal PC. The analysis of sequence data of the entire pig genome it will take days instead of weeks.”

Abe Huisman, R&D Director of Hypor, also sees various advantages.

He said: “The realisation of the HPC enables us to make use of enormous resources to do breeding related calculations. Calculations that would take days before the HPC was realised can now be done in hours or even minutes. This allows for greater flexibility in answering research questions, and analyzing a wide range of scenarios in a fraction of the time."

Cluster Available for All

The HPC cluster is available for researchers of Wageningen UR as well as for researchers of other knowledge institutes and companies. Options for expanding the system in the future to meet the growing demands of the users have been taken into account while purchasing the cluster. The cluster has 900 cores and a data storage capacity of 600 TBytes. The location is on the Wageningen campus.

Breed4Food - a consortium of animal breeding companies (CRV, Hendrix Genetics, TOPIGS, Cobb Europe) and the Animal Breeding and Genomics Centre of Wageningen UR - initiated the High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, a state-of-the-art computing facility for research and application of genomics information.