One new collaboration got off the ground April 22 with the opening of a new bioinformatics computing service called Vital-IT, based at the Swiss Bioinformatics Institute (SBI; Lausanne, Switzerland). The center is equipped with a 72-processor cluster based on Intel's new Itanium-2 central processing unit (CPU). Supplied at a significant discount by HP, the system runs at a speed of 450 gigaflops (1 GfloP = one billion calculations per second).
This type of cluster is admittedly modest compared to big supercomputer centers such as those at the University of San Diego Supercomputer Center (San Diego, CA, USA), the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (Champaign, IL, USA) or the Jülich Research Center (Jülich, Germany). But Victor Jongeneel, Vital-IT's project director, notes that the CPU power at those sites is mostly dedicated to other processor-hungry sciences, such as particle physics. The Vital-IT cluster, though, is unique in being dedicated entirely to bioinformatics. In particular, it will analyze new genomic and protein data generated by researchers at the three Swiss Universities of Lausanne, Geneva and Basel, as well as offering computing services to academics throughout Europe.
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