Systems/Enterprise:
UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO DEPLOYS GENOME
ANALYSIS GRID
Sun Microsystems Inc announced that the Human Genome Center (HGC), a branch
of the Institute of Medical Science of The University of Tokyo, has deployed
Sun Fire 15K servers as the basis of its human genome analysis system.
Powered by Sun's high-end 64-bit servers, the system went fully operational on
January 1, 2003.
HGC has deployed eight Sun Fire 15K servers and two Sun Fire 6800 servers with
a total of 788 UltraSPARC III processors and approximately 1.7 TB of
memory, making it one of the largest human genome analysis systems in Japan.
In addition to being the world's second largest Sun Fire 15K server
supercluster, the University of Tokyo's genome analysis system is one of the
world's largest Sun Fire 15K-based grid powered by Sun ONE Grid Engine
software.
"Sun's grid computing solutions are at the heart of many computing
environments in scientific research. Vanguards like the University of Tokyo
are pushing the envelope in both their research as well as their
implementation of leading-edge technologies like Sun ONE Grid Engine
software," said Wolfgang Gentzsch, director of grid computing, Sun
Microsystems. "The distinct advantages of Sun
Fire 15K systems, such as huge memory, large number of CPUs per system, system
and I/O bandwidth, computational and database performance, joined with the
resource utilization and productivity benefits of Sun ONE Grid Engine software
is a winning combination."
HGC adopted this new system to study and develop various methods for
analyzing
genomic information, while substantially expanding its database capacity and
data analysis services for genome researchers in Japan and abroad. Since
genomic research involves enormous databases, calculations are often very
time-consuming. Also, as bioinformatics is becoming increasingly popular and
the
scope of research is expanding, HGC anticipates an increase in the number of
heavy users of its services. For these reasons, HGC decided to switch to a new
high-performance computing system.
"Sun's commitment to working with higher education institutions around the
world, especially in the area of computational biology has yielded tremendous
results," said Kim Jones, vice president of Education and Research, Sun
Microsystems. "Sun's work with universities, such as The University of Tokyo
exemplifies the advantages of teaming with a proven hardware and software
leader in the field of high performance computing."
Genome analysis requires superior processor performance, huge memory
capacity,
and high-speed parallel database search functions. The Sun Fire 15K server is
ideal for this type of application because each server supports up to 106
processors and 576 GB of memory . HGC selected the Sun Fire 15K server,
recognizing its industry-leading scalability and outstanding internal bus
performance.
"HGC, along with numerous other world-class research institutions,
recognize
Sun's enterprise servers as the ideal platform for running complex database
applications, such as genome analysis," said Clark Masters, executive vice
president, Sun Microsystems. "With superior processor performance and huge
memory capacity, the Sun Fire 15K server, in particular, offers benefits that
competing vendors clearly cannot match."
The newly introduced system will be central to the genome analysis works at
HGC, which is one of the leading genome research institutions in Japan. The
system is expected to help the progress of society by providing broad-ranging
tools for advanced genome analysis, including large-scale database servers
(nucleic/amino acid sequence database, etc.) and simulation servers.
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