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Supercomputer revs up research

AUSTRALIA'S medical and agricultural research industry has received a boost with Sydney University launching the first dedicated supercomputer facility.

By JENNIFER FORESHEW (reprinted from Australian IT)

In a joint venture between Sydney University, Sun Microsystems and local Internet-based company eBioinformatics, the supercomputer will be used by both the academic and commercial sectors. It will be housed by eBioinformatics at the Australian Technology Park, Sydney.

EBioinformatics chief scientific officer Tim Littlejohn said the supercomputer would help medical and agricultural research.

The supercomputer has more than 20 times the power of the equivalent single processor model and will be used for molecular modelling, evolutionary studies and genetic analysis.

The initiative is an extension of the university's Australian National Genomic Information Service (ANGIS), established in 1991, which provides access to international databases and bioinformatics tools.

Sun has provided some of the hardware and support for the facility via its Academic Excellence Grant Scheme. EBioinformatics, a commercial spin-off of ANGIS, will provide technical expertise and ongoing support.

The supercomputer will use "farming" and "clustering" technology and will have an almost unlimited potential capacity, Professor Littlejohn said. "There is a large amount of processing power here and this thing is very scalable, so we can go from 23 nodes now to up to hundreds or thousands potentially."

He said the facility would primarily be used by Sydney University academics and students.

"We have a very large number of biomedical researchers in the country that are really going to feel an improvement in their ability to do research," he said.

Sydney University microbiology department head Peter Reeves said the facility would allow scientists to run comparisons in full rather than making approximations.

"We expect to get much better pictures of what our data means," he said. "Getting the data is usually not the limiting factor -- it is analysing and exploring the meaning of it."

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