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In less time than the blink of an eye, the Translational Genomics
Research Institute's new supercomputer at Arizona State University can
do operations equal to every dollar in the recent Wall Street bailout. That
would be 700 billion computations in less than 1/60th of a second, says
Dan Stanzione, director of the High Performance Computing Initiative at
ASU's Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.
The "Saguaro 2"
supercomputer, housed on the first floor of ASU's Barry M. Goldwater
Center for Science and Engineering, is capable of 50 trillion
mathematical operations per second. "That's the equivalent of
taking a calculator and doing one operation per second, by hand,
continuously for the next one and a half million years," Stanzione said.
Although the computing world changes daily, and measurements depend
on numerous factors, Stanzione said, for some functions, ASU's new
computer may be among the top five in the world.
TGen will need
that speed as it continues its research into a variety of human
diseases through the use of data-rich DNA sequencing, genotyping,
microarrays and bioinformatics.
"This is really a remarkable
testament," to the cooperative efforts of ASU and TGen, said Dr.
Jeffrey Trent, President and Scientific Director of TGen, especially in
a tight funding environment.
The new supercomputer will help
TGen's efforts in translational biomedicine, developing new therapies
targeted for individual patients suffering from Alzheimer's, autism,
diabetes, coronary heart disease, melanoma, pancreatic cancer, prostate
cancer, colon cancer, multiple myeloma, and breast cancer.
Dr.
Edward Suh, TGen's Chief Information Officer, said a joint TGen-ASU
computer support team is being assembled, and he urged the creation of
more partnerships between TGen and ASU.
"I am confident this
new supercomputer system will help the ASU and TGen scientists expedite
their research, and accelerate innovation in biomedical and engineering
research," Suh said. "It is my hope to see this supercomputer system,
and a supporting informatics program which Dan and I are putting
together, bring the ASU and TGen scientists closer than before for even
greater success."
Saguaro 2 – a partially water-cooled set of
7-foot-tall black monolith computer racks, each with as many as 512
processor cores, and linked by ultra-high-speed Infiniband cables – was
funded in part by a nearly $2 million grant in July by the National
Institutes of Health. The grant was in response to a wide range of
scientific activities proposed by TGen, the Ira A. Fulton School of
Engineering, and ASU's BioDesign Institute.
The new system
doubles the capabilities of ASU's High Performance Computing Initiative
(HPCI). The system consists of Intel microprocessors, servers from
Dell, storage from Data Direct Networks, and components from a number
of other partners, including fiber optic cables from Phoenix-based
Zarlink.
More importantly for TGen, the new system has 20 times
the previous computational power available to TGen researchers, said
James Lowey, director of TGen's High Performance Biocomputing Center.
The
new supercomputer also adds to the storage capacity of the HPCI,
bringing the total storage to 1.5 quadrillion bytes, or 1.5 petabytes
-- or 15 followed by 14 zeroes (1,500,000,000,000,000). That's enough
storage space to record nearly a quarter million DVD discs.
The
HPCI storage will be used to store a vast array of data from TGen's
sequencers and simulations, as well as other large datasets from ASU
researchers, including a high resolution mapping of the moon to be
performed in 2009 by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Stanzione said the dedication marked the start of "our next era in supercomputing," and of three ASU milestones:
- The start of production operations of Saguaro 2.
- The beginning of a new and stronger partnership with TGen.
- The nearly three years since the start of ASU's High Performance Computing Initiative.
"I
firmly believe that computation is crucial to the competitiveness of
our research at TGen and at ASU, and is increasingly crucial to our
economic competitiveness as a state, and nation, as well," Stanzione
said.
High performance computing addresses the needs of science
beyond theory and experimentation to "the ever more important role of
simulation," which he called the "Third Mode" of scientific progress.
"As
we move in science into the nano scale of materials and molecular
design and diagnostics, or into the macro scale of global climate or
the motion of the galaxies, experimentation becomes more expensive and
difficult, and simulation becomes invaluable," Stanzione said. "The
speed of those simulations determine the speed of progress."
The computational speed of Saguaro 2 is especially critical to the work of TGen.
"In
2009, more genome sequence data will be generated than all the words
spoken by humans in all of history. Teasing meaningful understanding
from this avalanche of data is also the role of HPC (high performance
computing)," Stanzione said.
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