ASTRONOMY

As a part of this agreement, Intel has decided to establish a life sciences competency center within the SIB and its Vital-IT initiative near Lausanne, one of the key life sciences centers in Europe and often called the “Swiss Biotech Valley”. With this project, Intel intends to accelerate the availability of open source and commercial life sciences software applications tuned for Itanium® 2 processor-based clusters. The company will collaborate with researchers to develop next-generation life sciences solutions and help creating a world-class computing resource for the life sciences and bio-informatics research community. “Data generation was once the primary industry challenge in the life sciences arena. Companies and research organizations now enjoy, yet suffer from, massive volumes of data,” says John Davies, vice president, Solutions Market Development for Intel. “The challenge today is how to store, analyze and interpret the data, putting a huge emphasis on server-side data-mining and visualization technologies. Itanium 2-based systems deliver industry-leading performance to address these needs.” Vital-IT is a newly created group of the SIB, designed to offer high performance computing tools and expertise to fundamental research in life sciences. This initiative is funded by the SIB and its partner institutions –the EPFL and the Universities of Lausanne, Geneva and Basel, that are of highly complementary competences. The collaboration will focus on porting codes developed, or used, by the SIB scientists for Itanium® 2 processor-based systems from HP. Other important life sciences codes will be ported to Intel-based HP solutions over the next three years. All three parties will bring expertise to the cooperation: Intel will deliver its technology in conjunction with intensive training for software developers and customers. HP will source production clusters build on the Intel’s Itanium® 2 processor and provide support for the software developers. Vital-IT members will build, develop and maintain a collaborative platform for services and consulting in bio-informatics as part of the life sciences competency center. Life sciences software applications ported on Itanium® 2 processor-based systems will be made available through open source or commercial channels. Researchers, universities, hospital labs and industry players as well as commercial companies are expected to benefit from the acceleration of information exchange. Intel will demonstrate real-life scenarios based on customer experience showing that Itanium® 2 processor server products are the leading platform for life sciences application deployment. The center will call on other third-party technology, biotech or pharma firms, and the partners will jointly share the results of the collaboration in a variety of external scientific and high-tech forums, events and publications.