HEALTH

Leading edge research requires the latest technology, and nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. A cluster of lightening-fast Dell machines compute over five trillion complex mathematical operations a second - calculations that are taking chemical research to a new level. For Stacey Wetmore, a Canada Research Chair in Computational Chemistry and an associate professor at the University of Lethbridge, the Dell cluster (made up of 85 DVD player-sized Dell computer nodes with two quad-core processors in each node) will cut research time and costs significantly. To put this into perspective, a home computer usually houses one core and one processor. Utilizing the cluster to study calculations and acquire information about chemical systems, she can enter complex data and get accurate results far faster than by using beakers and test tubes. Having the 85 nodes talking to one another is the key to the power of the cluster. Instead of one computer taking 48 hours to complete a job, the cluster can farm the job out to eight or 16 computers at a time, completing the calculation eight to 16 times faster than normal. "Five years ago it would have been impossible to run the calculations that we are currently running in our lab," says Wetmore. "With the installation of the cluster, we will be able to advance our research even further by using even larger models and more accurate theories." Currently, Wetmore and her team are modeling damage to DNA caused by, for example, UV light, pesticides and other factors that lead to mutations causing cancer and a number of other serious diseases. In order to fully understand the biological molecules involved, the researchers need to use models that contain many atoms and provide trusted results. To do so, they need a lot of computing power - which the cluster, as powerful as 700 home computers at 5,059 Gigaflops, provides. "The work being done at the University of Lethbridge is crucial to the advancement of medical research in Canada," said Greg Davis, President, Dell Canada. "Dell is proud that the advanced computing power it provides to the University of Lethbridge is helping to unleash the ability of what Canada's great minds can accomplish." The cluster, which the University of Lethbridge named Uracil (Upscale and Robust Abacus for Chemistry in Lethbridge) after an important molecule in biology and a form of damaged DNA that Wetmore and her students study, was funded by the University of Lethbridge, the Canada Research Chair Program, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Dell Inc.