INDUSTRY

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has joined with Intel Corporation, Oracle, and HP to demonstrate grid-based bioinformatics tools using an Oracle 10g database on Intel® Itanium® 2-based systems at SC2003. SC2003, the world's largest high-performance computing and networking conference, will be held Nov. 15-21 at the Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center. Intel's booth at SC will feature a demonstration of the Grid-BLAST bioinformatics portal on a four-node Intel Itanium 2-based cluster running Oracle's 10g grid software. Grid-BLAST was jointly developed by NCSA and the W.M. Keck Center for Comparative and Functional Genomics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in order to simplify and speed researchers' efforts to analyze genomic data. Grid-BLAST consists of a web portal that allows researchers to launch BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) jobs from the web and distributes them onto NCSA's high-performance Linux clusters. "The portal allows researchers to focus on their science, rather than the technology that supports it," said Lei Liu, the Director of Bioinformatics at the Keck Center and a research scientist at NCSA. The demo showcases the power of the Intel Itanium 2 architecture and Oracle's 10g database, an update of the company's flagship database product that is designed to handle terabytes of data and to enable users to run a single application across multiple servers. "We are pleased to be working with the clear leaders in grid computing, Oracle, HP and Intel," said Michelle Butler, head of NCSA's Storage Enabling Technologies group. " The grid-based bioinformatics tools will greatly benefit scientists and researchers by simplifying yet maximizing their time and efforts on their research analysis." Grid-BLAST also will be demonstrated at NCSA's SC03 booth (#2333).