Biomedical Computing Centre
The Biomedical Computing Centre (BCC) is one of the important facilities within the Institute and is an essential facility for supporting the next-generation sequencing analysis (NGS), bioinformatics, data analysis, artificial intelligence (Al)-based data analysis, biomedical research and translational genomics – the focus of the Institute.
The Centre enhanced its data centre infrastructure (incl. core network and structured cabling) alongside overall upgrades to computing servers, storage systems capacity, high-speed file systems and data management starting in 2021. All system improvements and upgrades were made based on the existing data centre infrastructure architecture, together with 12 IT equipment racks in the Research Data Centre (RDC) in Hong Kong Children's Hospital (HKCH).
In 2024, the Centre continued upgrading and improving the equipment to provide better service and support to the researchers in their work.
The Centre enhanced its data centre infrastructure (incl. core network and structured cabling) alongside overall upgrades to computing servers, storage systems capacity, high-speed file systems and data management starting in 2021. All system improvements and upgrades were made based on the existing data centre infrastructure architecture, together with 12 IT equipment racks in the Research Data Centre (RDC) in Hong Kong Children's Hospital (HKCH).
In 2024, the Centre continued upgrading and improving the equipment to provide better service and support to the researchers in their work.
The Centre continues to upgrade its equipment from time to time to enhance service and support for researchers. Recent upgrade includes:
- In addition to the high-performance computing servers for bioinformatics and Al that we acquired, an updated cluster computing service was established and is now servicing researchers.
- The clustered computer nodes now provide a total of 5,584 CPU cores, 94TB of system memory and a total of 376 TFLOPS of processing power. The GPU systems have been integrated into a new GPU Al cluster computing architecture that can provide over 6 petaFLOPS of Al operations and 10 petaOPS of INT8 performance.
- Virtualisation and other related cloud computing technologies were introduced, enabling services and resources to be delivered to researchers in more flexible, efficient and secure manner.
- High-performance file systems were updated and upgraded, providing an extra 30% of Tier-1 and 40% of Tier-2 usable storage space for researchers.
- The BCC network infrastructure was recently improved in line with industry best practices, facilitating connectivity for emerging high-speed "multi-node, multiGPU" computing devices that support up to 400Gbps and even 800Gbps in the near future.
- A new surveillance system was deployed with an upgraded set of cameras in the BCC environment to enhance image quality.
- BCC will continually explore possibilities to reduce power consumption in the metric of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), through strategies such as direct cooling to meet the growing demands of the centre.
For enquiries, please contact the Biomedical Computing Centre:
