GAMING

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- SGI Altix 3000 Supercluster is Powered by 64 Itanium 2 Processors and 196GB Memory -- SGI today announced that the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis (CBS), a division of the Technical University of Denmark, has selected SGI storage and supercomputing technologies to solve the massive data computation challenges associated with biological modeling. CBS research focuses on the creation of proteomic- and genomic-based models of cells for virtual analysis of complex biological processes. "The Human Genome Project has provided us with much of the data we need in order to single out specific genes that might correlate with known health problems," said Soren Brunak, founder, director and bioinformatics professor at CBS. "We now need to analyze this striking raw data. The power of SGI systems is absolutely critical for this type of task, as it requires enormous amounts of shared memory." SGI builds supercomputing systems with the world's most advanced shared-memory architecture, enabling scientists and researchers trying to solve complex problems to compute vast amounts of data faster and in a more coherent manner than on conventional distributed-memory systems. To meet the center's ever-growing computer technology needs, SGI has provided a solution that includes an SGI(R) Altix(TM) 3000 supercluster with 64 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors and 196GB memory. The system, augmented by a 10TB storage system, the SGI(R) TP9400 Fibre Channel RAID array, enables CBS researchers to further their basic research in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology. The new system increases the computational power of the three 32-processor SGI(R) Origin(R) 300 servers and one 32-processor SGI(R) Origin(R) 2000 supercomputer already installed at the center. The recently introduced SGI Altix 3000 supercluster already has been adopted by more than 25 major research organizations around the world, including the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute, the Queensland Parallel Supercomputer Foundation and the University of Cambridge's COSMOS project. The Altix system combines three powerful technologies -- the most advanced Intel(R) processor, the Linux(R) operating system and the SGI(R) NUMAflex(TM) shared-memory supercomputing architecture -- creating a solution that enables world-record performance and helps solve the most challenging problems of the 21st century. Since its launch earlier this year, the family of Intel(R) Itanium(TM) 2 processor-based SGI Altix 3000 systems has shattered scalability and performance records on high-performance computing industry-standard benchmarks. Because of its performance profile, the Altix system is especially well-matched for genomic research. The SGI Altix 3000 system at CBS is being installed with MySQL(R), the world's most popular open-source database, recognized for its high performance and reliability. "MySQL is optimized for 64-bit Linux on Itanium 2 and can handle virtually unlimited amounts of data. We are pleased to be partnered with the SGI Altix 3000 family to meet CBS's extraordinary database computing needs," explained Bertrand Matthelie, director of alliances at MySQL AB, the company that develops, markets and supports the MySQL database. "We look forward to working with CBS and SGI in the years to come as this installation matures and expands." "We are gratified that CBS has joined SGI in the vision of delivering powerful supercomputing solutions to scientists, which they have acknowledged by adopting our recently launched Altix superclusters," added SGI's Steve Coggins, senior vice president and general manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa. "Through the years, CBS has taken a leading role in genomics research, and it is an exciting challenge for us to provide its esteemed researchers with customized computational and data management solutions." Intel's Tom Gibbs, director, Worldwide Industry Marketing, said, "Drug discovery is constantly at the forefront of technology, pushing the boundaries of high-performance computing and demanding higher processing power with greater scalability. The Itanium Processor Family delivers new levels of performance to support this kind of complex, data-intensive operation in both academic and enterprise environments."