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
solutions at Aberdeen Group,
told the E-Commerce Times.
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."
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.
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.