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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
GENOME DATA ANALYSIS MADE EASY
THROUGH GRIDS
To help scientists make sense of the huge amounts of data that is churned
out
these days, the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) and Sun Microsystems are
harnessing the power of high-performance computing technology.
They are establishing the Sun-GIS Centre of Excellence in Digital Biology,
to
allow researchers here to tap into Grid computing to solve complex problems as
well as share information with other research institutes.
Said Sun Microsystems' vice-president and managing director for Asia South,
Lionel Lim, "The wealth of new data available from the genomes of humans and
other organisms have given rise to the need to efficiently manage that data
and provide the necessary tools to analyze it."
The institute's executive director, Edison Liu, added, "Ultimately,
everything
that we do here is dependent on access to high-end, fast computational
activities."
Much of the previous work in computational biology was performed by people
trained in computer science, mathematics or statistics, working independently
of the lab where the data originated.
Said GIS group leader for scientific computing, Heidi Dowst, "By creating a
platform that's easy for our scientists to use, we're giving them the ability
to study their own data, rather than having to rely on others."
So, for example, a scientist could collect the genetic sequences of a
portion
of the SARS virus, taken from various different samples. And instead of giving
it to informatics experts to analyze, he could do it himself.
The new center of excellence joins a worldwide network of institutions
doing
groundbreaking research, including the University of Chicago, the Canadian
Bioinformatics Resource and Taiwan National Cheng Kung University.
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