ACADEMIA

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- The Institute for Chemical Research (ICR) at Kyoto University, which has supported chemistry studies of all kinds since early in the 20th century, has become the site of one of the biggest supercomputing systems in Japan with the purchase of a 768-CPU parallel supercomputing system from SGI (NYSE: SGI). ICR will use the system to further its work in bioinformatics and computational chemistry research. The recently signed contract calls for delivery of two SGI(TM) Origin(TM) 3800 systems, with 512 CPUs dedicated to computational chemistry and 256 CPUs for computational biology. In addition, SGI is delivering an SGI(TM) Onyx(R) 3400 visualization system with 32 CPUs, along with an SGI(TM) TP9400 35TB storage system. Installation is taking place this fall, with operations set to begin in January 2002. "SGI's long and successful history of support for bioinformatics research in Japan played a major role in ICR's decision to choose SGI technologies for this upgrade," said SGI's Knut Korsell, vice president of Industry and Solutions Marketing. "We are very pleased to be selected by ICR to support the tremendous supercomputing power demanded by one of the leading teams in the global effort to advance our understanding of the life sciences." This is just the latest contribution that SGI has made to advancing the goals of ICR and its peer organizations throughout Japan and the world. Over the past decade, SGI has delivered a variety of systems to ICR for genomics research and has helped ICR launch the GenomeNet Database Service, a group of genomics databases for researchers around the world. GenomeNet, which includes the influential Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), consists of a suite of databases requiring terabytes of storage and associated software for maintenance and analysis. "The data objects in KEGG are huge graphs encompassing the entire gene universe, representing relationships among all known genes," said Minoru Kanehisa, professor, Kyoto University. "We needed not only a massively parallel computing capability but also a large shared memory space, which is the reason we chose the SGI Origin 3800 as our next supercomputer system." SGI Japan Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI, has provided high-level support and dedicated bioinformatics technical staff expertise to Japan's emerging bioinformatics industry since 1997. The staff, drawn from SGI Japan's Research and Development Solution Systems team, provides a spectrum of customer services to key SGI research lab customers throughout Japan. The team builds specialized software and support services for ensuring access to daily updates of the most popular bioinformatics databases, such as GenBank, EMBL and SwissProt, in order to ensure the highest performance of customer installations. SGI's rich history with ICR also includes funding an upcoming three-year professor position and training course within ICR's Bioinformatics Laboratory. A related bioinformatics program, to be offered from 2002 to 2005, will be developed by the professorship candidate, with hiring currently in progress. SGI, which has made a long-term commitment to and has been a leader in the life sciences community for more than 15 years, delivers computational solutions for life and chemical sciences discovery research organizations in pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, academic and national labs. It is the trusted technology of choice for leading bioinformatics and genomics research institutions around the world: -- The Scripps Research Institute, one of the world's leading centers for the study of the structure and design of biological molecules, recently purchased a 128-processor SGI Origin 3800 supercomputer, two 64-processor SGI(TM) 2000 series servers, 1TB of RAID and an SGI(TM) Origin(TM) 200 server. Used for large computational chemistry simulations, crucial in scientific discovery, these technologies run on a storage area network using SGI(TM) CXFS(TM), a clustered, shared, high-performance filesystem. -- SGI is the leading platform at the Ontario Centre for Genomic Computing (OCGC), which recently installed a new 192-CPU SGI Origin 3800 system. Located at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, the OCGC is the largest supercomputing center in the world devoted solely to genomics. -- The National Center for Gene Research of Shanghai Life Science is installing a recently purchased 32-processor SGI Origin 3800 system that will be used for the genetic analysis of rice grain. The aim is to create a higher quality of grain that is virus-resistant and at the same time increase the quantity of rice production. For more information visit www.sgi.com/solutions/sciences/chembio/