Constructing a GPU cluster platform based on multiple NVIDIA Jetson TK1

High-end graphics processing units (GPUs), such as NVIDIA Fermi/Tesla series cards, are widely applied to the high performance computing fields in a decade. NVIDIA releases Tegra K1, called Jetson TK1, which contains 4 ARM Cortex-A15 CPUs and 192 CUDA cores (Kepler GPU) is an embedded board with low cost, low power consumption, and high applicability advantages for several specific applications. In the previous work, we have constructed a bioinformatics platform based on single NVIDIA Jetson TK1, and ClustalWtk tool for multiple sequence alignments was designed on this platform. With more and more biological sequences generated and high computing power requirement, it is necessary to construct a cluster platform based on multiple NVIDIA Jetson TK1. In this paper, a bioinformatics platform based on a cluster of multiple NVIDIA Jetson TK1 is constructed. Besides, two job assignment modes are proposed in this platform: one is a “user selected” mode and another is an “automatic assigned” mode. ClustalWtk tool also is ported on this platform with these two modes, respectively.