INDUSTRY

In character with its record of innovation and community involvement, Terra Soft has founded a consortium of thought leaders dedicated to developing and disseminating best practice solutions for high productivity life science computing at the petascale level. Glen Otero, Ph.D., Chief Scientist at Terra Soft Solutions explains, "The consortium's primary goal is developing, validating, and disseminating next generation tools and procedures for the creation, management, and growth of life science HPC ecosystems; software technologies that enable high throughput as well as high performance computing in the life sciences. We launched the consortium concept at SC2006 in Tampa Bay, Florida. It has since quickly gained momentum and an enthusiastic registrant list." Initial participants include research professionals from the Department of Energy: Argonne, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories; IBM, Mercury Computers, Tungsten Graphics, and several university researchers. Much of the consortium's focus revolves around the Cell-based clusters scheduled to be installed in Terra Soft's new 3000 sq-ft supercomputing center. Once the clusters are up and running, Terra Soft will assist the membership with cluster access. There are no membership fees or access charges for public and non-profit institutions such as the Department of Energy labs or university research departments. According to Terra Soft, commercial organizations will pay a reasonable access fee. The consortium is welcoming participation from the public, commercial, and non-profit sectors. Ideal candidates are actively engaged in computationally intensive research projects, the creation of new frameworks for HPC and life science research workflow integration, and application development for the Cell processor. Researchers who desire to gain access to consortium resources are asked to submit a brief proposal for consideration at its Web site. For more information about the HPC Consortium, visit its Web site.