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HP Supercomputer To Boost Genomic Research

 
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By Lisa Gill
NewsFactor Network
September 26, 2002

HP also announced plans to build what it called the world's most powerful Linux supercomputer in a deal worth $24.5 million. The computer will be used by the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
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Researchers on a quest to map the human genome got a computational boost Wednesday when Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) announced the installation of a US$22 million supercomputer in one of the United Kingdom's preeminent genomic research facilities.

Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) will have access to what HP has called the largest high-performance computer attached to a computer grid anywhere in the world. According to HP, the supercomputer will double the Institute's computational power and will triple its storage capacity. Calculations that currently take a month to compute will require just a single day with the new system.

The HP AlphaServer supercomputer is comprised of eight ES45, four ES40, two DS20 and one 32-CPU GS320 systems.

"Alpha systems have always been a leader in high-performance technical computing," Robert Dorin, vice president of research enterprise server Latest News about Servers solutions at Aberdeen Group, told the E-Commerce Times.


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Scientists Benefit

The purchase of the supercomputer is part of a five-year plan by the WTSI to realize healthcare benefits from its work with the Human Genome Project.

The center also studies the DNA makeup of such diseases as malaria, sleeping sickness, typhoid and tuberculosis in hopes of being able to develop treatments and vaccines.

"DNA is a four-bit linear code; proteins in the cell are three-dimensional objects interacting with one another, " said Phil Butcher, head of systems at WTSI. "Our computing needs can be met only by finding flexible, scalable solutions that allow adaptation and growth in this demanding environment."

HP Joins CERN

The computer maker also announced it has joined CERN, the world's largest particle physics center, in its openlab project for DataGrid applications. HP is set to help scientists figure out how massive amounts of data can be better stored for the research community and the IT industry.

Beginning in 2007, CERN's next-generation particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, will start generating data at the rate of millions of gigabytes -- or petabytes -- per second.

While only a fraction of the information will be stored for analysis, even that amount of data is predicted to be enormous. CERN is hoping to distribute the data worldwide to scientists in order to solve the storage capacity issue and allow other researchers to access it.

Linux Power Deal

HP also said Wednesday that it will build what it called the world's most powerful Linux supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in a deal worth $24.5 million.

With 9.2 teraflops of computational ability when fully operational, the Linux cluster would rank second on the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, trailing only NEC's Earth Simulator in Kanazawa, Japan, which operates at 35.68 teraflops.

"The concern about Linux has always been is it robust enough, is it reliable enough, what does it mean to be running open source infrastructure?" Aberdeen's Dorin noted. "If anything, the high-performance technical computing [community] is more forgiving in that regard. They've always been early adopters [of] new technology."

He pointed to the low cost of Linux as another factor that has driven researchers to adopt it, based on their need to garner as much computing ability as possible for the lowest possible price.

 

 
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