SERVICES: Assessment

A large percentage of BioTeam professional services fall under the category of "technical audit" or "needs assessment" projects.

In these engagements, BioTeam consultants are able to leverage their broad skill sets and experience to identify and document technical requirements as well as provide honest and un-biased recommendations to our clients. Our ability to act as an impartial 3rd party that understands both science and high performance computing ('HPC') allows us to research, document and deliver objective reports while minimizing or removing any organizational or political difficulties sometimes encountered during inhouse efforts.

Some examples from recent work include:

Evaluating prototype products for suitability in the life science market
A multi-national corporation had internally developed an exotic and potentially novel computing appliance. The company was still evaluating early prototypes and trying to understand the size and requirements of potential markets. BioTeam was hired to evaluate the device from a life-science viewpoint and was given access to extensive technical documentation and one of the few existing engineering prototypes. Our analysis and detailed report (including very blunt observations and conclusions) was later used to justify an internal "continue development" vs. "halt development" management decision.

Research Infrastructure Optimization & Assessment
A well-known University was operating a Linux cluster as a multidisciplinary computing resource for many campus labs and departments. The cluster had an enthusiastic userbase and was operating at 99% load almost continuously. After users began complaining of long delays and wait times in returning job results, BioTeam was hired to assess the cluster and the configuration of the Platform LSF 'DRM' software layer. After spending a day onsite interviewing cluster operators and analyzing 2.5 years worth of system accounting logs, BioTeam was able to return on the 2nd day and propose simple LSF policy configuration changes to improve the end-user experience without requiring an expensive expansion of the cluster itself.

Scientific Computing Needs Assessment
The IS organization of a multi-billion dollar corporation planning construction of a 500,000 square foot collaborative research facility hired the BioTeam to document the computing requirements of all current and planned scientific research efforts. During the project, BioTeam staff spent two months interviewing more than 40 scientists, managers and IT professionals at all levels within the company. The final report documented the research being done across all departments and summarized each in terms of compute, storage, network, archive and backup requirements. The technical computing requirements documented by the BioTeam were used to design the high performance computing ('HPC') core facility and the storage, compute and network resources deployed within.

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