APPLICATIONS

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., -- The University of Tokyo's Human Genome Center (HGC), located within the university's Institute of Medical Science, has purchased an SGI(R) Origin(R) 3900 server, the newest model of the SGI(R) Origin(R) 3000 series of supercomputers from SGI. The installation, scheduled to begin operations in January, comprises the first large-scale Origin 3900 system in the world. SGI Japan will provide the system, which is intended for human genome analysis and such computational chemistry applications as protein structure and prediction. Genomics is the study of all of the nucleotide sequences, including structural genes, in the chromosomes of an organism, which can lead to remarkable medical advances, among other breakthroughs, over time. HGC's need to deal with increased human genome data volume was the primary motivation for the upgrade, which has resulted in a threefold improvement over the system that was replaced, a Cray T94(TM) supercomputer and SGI(R) Origin(R) 2000 system. HGC, founded in 1991, has been using supercomputers since 1997 to analyze human genome data. Increased computing power has become necessary in response to increased volumes of data being generated by the genome structure analysis, DNA data analysis and sequence data processing fields, along with increased numbers of genome database users. In addition to the new system, which features 512 CPUs and 512GB of memory, SGI Japan will deliver a 5TB SGI(R) TP9400 Fibre Channel storage system. The Origin 3900 system has the SGI(R) NUMAflex(TM) shared-memory architecture. It features four times the density of earlier Origin 3000 models, greatly reducing the amount of space needed to install large-scale, high-performance parallel systems, while simultaneously reducing power consumption. With its new Origin 3900 server, HGC has been able to upgrade its computing capabilities without significantly increasing square footage.