ACADEMIA

Interactive Supercomputing Inc.'s (ISC) Star-P software was named a finalist in the Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Contest for best "Humanitarian Impact Innovation" technology. The Humanitarian Impact category recognizes innovative use of applications running on Itanium 2-based systems that demonstrate a profound impact on humanity through research, social improvements or other humanitarian efforts. Examples include weather prediction, storm monitoring, tsunami model forecasting, and genetic and medical research. Star-P earned the honor for enabling researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to plumb a vast public database of genomic information for potential discoveries. The genomic profiling effort may help researchers better understand genetic risk factors for cancer. An explosion in the amount of genomic data available to NCI researchers made their work increasingly difficult. On a desktop, some routine algorithm processing took more than two days to complete. By bridging the desktop to an Itanium-based SGI(R) Altix system with six processors and 25GB of memory using Star-P, the entire correlation can be done in less than 15 minutes. Star-P is an interactive parallel computing platform that lets NCI scientists and other users to continue to work with their preferred desktop tools, such as MATLAB, Python and R, but run the correlations interactively on Altix servers. This eliminates the need to re-program the models in C, FORTRAN or MPI languages to run on the parallel computer. As a result, the answers to some NCI researchers' questions are arriving up to 200 times faster than ever before. "Interactive Supercomputing's Star-P technology uses the inherent capabilities of Intel Itanium 2 architecture to meet the high performance computing demands of genomic profiling research," said Robin Drummond, president of the Itanium Solutions Alliance. "Interactive Supercomputing's work with the National Cancer Institute demonstrates how Itanium-based computing innovation allows organizations to reach new levels of data processing and performance." Contest winners will be announced in April at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, China.