Compaq <CPQ.N>, Singapore plan bio-supercomputer
3/11/02 10:06 PM
Source: Reuters
SINGAPORE, March 12 (Reuters) - Compaq Computer Corp and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) agreed on Tuesday to invest S$12.4 million ($6.8 million) to develop the largest life sciences supercomputing facility in the region.
The costs, shared equally by both parties, will go mainly towards hardware and software for the newly launched Bioinformatics Research Centre (BIRC) at NTU.
"We are designing the largest life science supercomputing system in the Asia Pacific region, outside of Japan, that's capable of achieving half a trillion operations per second for BIRC," Tan Choon Seng, Compaq's ASEAN managing director, told a news conference.
The infrastructure will be implemented in phases and the computer is expected to be ranked among the 80 most powerful computing systems in the world when fully installed in early 2003. U.S. computer maker Compaq is a big supplier of servers to the life science sector and has a partnership with U.S. firm Celera Genomics to write software and build a supercomputer to unravel the human genome sequence.
"The attraction of working with Compaq is the fact that they have linkages into all the research institutions as well as universities, so through these linkages we can have access to other researchers," NTU President Cham Tao Soon said.
Compaq is also offering S$4 million cash in the form of research grants, scholarships and student awards.
The new institute, which will focus on education, research and development and human resources training in bioinformatics, will be the third in Singapore to focus on the upcoming field which bridges biology, physics, engineering and computing.
Singapore has been aggressively pushing biomedical sciences as a new pillar of its economy and a means to diversify from its dependence on electronics manufacturing.
Copyright 2002, Reuters News Service |
