Bioinformatics Consortium at University of Missouri Adds SGI Technology for Large-Scale Computational Life Sciences Research
SGI Altix System With SGI InfiniteStorage SAN Is Key Performance Upgrade to Multi-Vendor Environment
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- To add significant computing and storage capacity to existing life sciences research infrastructure, the Bioinformatics Consortium at the University of Missouri recently purchased high-performance computing technology from Silicon Graphics (OTC: SGID) and an SGI(R) InfiniteStorage storage area network (SAN) with 8TB of capacity. The new SGI(R) Altix(R) server was specifically chosen for its shared-memory architecture and Linux(R) operating environment, which will allow researchers, particularly in areas of molecular dynamics, molecular modeling, protein structure prediction, and a number of allied activities, to run larger-scale problems than ever before.
Installed in November, the SGI systems were made available to university researchers beginning in mid-December. The Altix will immediately take over a large number of big computational chemistry jobs currently being run on a slower server, including structural studies of bipolymers, chemistry in interstellar space, and polar order in crystalline organic molecular materials. Researchers studying environmental issues using satellite and GIS data, and other scientists studying electrical properties of solid-state devices, have already requested blocks of time on the SGI Altix system as well. There is also very early-stage research of electronic structure, crystal structures and chemical structures of various biological compounds with the idea of being able to use natural organic compounds to develop computational capabilities. The primary reason the University purchased the SGI Altix system is to run these kinds of problems, which require massive processing power and shared-memory architecture to get results in hours instead of days or weeks.
'One of the key inhibiting factors for researchers who want to run larger problems is the size.......
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