Sectors » Life Sciences
The freshly minted Dell EMC division of Dell Technologies is on a mission to take HPC mainstream with a strategy that hinges on engineered solutions, beginning with a focus on three industry verticals: manufacturing, research and life sciences. “Unlike traditional HPC where everybody bought parts, assembled parts and ran the workloads and did iterative engineering, we want folks to focus on time to innovation and let us worry about the infrastructure,” said Jim Ganthier, senior vice president, validated solutions organization at Dell EMC Converged Platforms Solution Division.
NORWICH, England & KEFLAVIK, Iceland, Sept. 26 — The Earlham Institute (EI) has announced its new partnership with Verne Global, a global developer at the forefront of data centre infrastructure design. EI has selected Verne Global’s data centre campus in Iceland to investigate the efficiencies of distributing large-scale genomics and computational biology data analysis. The research institute Read more…
Declining DNA sequencing costs and the rush to do whole genome sequencing (WGS) of large cohort populations – think 5000 subjects now, but many more thousands soon – presents a formidable computational challenge to researchers attempting to make sense of large cohort datasets. No single architecture is best. This month researchers report developing a hybrid Read more…
Throughout the past year, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications has been celebrating its 30th anniversary. On Friday, Larry Smarr, whose unsolicited 1983 proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) begat NCSA in 1985 and helped spur NSF to create not one but five national centers for supercomputing, gave a celebratory talk at NCSA.
DataDirect Networks (DDN) today introduced a third member to its WOS object storage product line, the WOS 8460, aimed at active archive and collaboration use cases. Object storage, once mainly restricted to ‘cold’ archives for large quantities of unstructured data – think content delivery networks (CDN) used in conjunction with the web – has been slowly expanding its footprint into other application areas. The new DDN product fills out the company’s object storage portfolio and is positioned between DDN’s WOS 9660 offering, intended more for traditional ‘cold’ archives, and WOS 7000, which is well suited for embedded applications such as use with S3.
Modeling protein interactions with drugs has long been computationally challenging. One obstacle is these interactions often take relatively long to occur and conventional molecular dynamics simulation is insufficient. This week a group of researchers, using several EXSEDE supercomputers, report a hybrid in silico-experimental approach that shows promise as a drug design tool for use with G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs)
Sorting out computational biology’s future is tricky. It likely won’t be singular. First-principle, mechanistic simulation has so far proven challenging but could eventually become game changing. Meanwhile pattern recognition and matching in massive ‘omics’ datasets have been extremely productive and likely to remain dominant at present. Now, an MIT professor and colleagues write that two Read more…
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced today that it will acquire rival HPC server maker SGI for $7.75 per share, or about $275 million, inclusive of cash and debt. The deal ends the seven-year reprieve that kept the SGI banner flying after Rackable Systems purchased the bankrupt Silicon Graphics Inc. for $25 million in 2009 and assumed the SGI brand. Bringing SGI into its fold bolsters HPE’s high-performance computing and data analytics capabilities and expands its position…
Processing the high-volume datasets, particularly image data, generated by modern scientific instruments is a huge challenge. Last week, a team of researchers from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center reported a novel approach to coping with the data flood – the Virtual Volume File System (VVFS) – which they say significantly reduces storage capacity requirements and facilitates Read more…
ARM Ltd has agreed to be bought by Japanese technology company SoftBank for $32B according to both companies. ARM-based chips are already dominant players in the mobile computing market and recently efforts to push ARM processors into servers, including HPC, have gained momentum. For example, Japan’s next flagship supercomputer, the post K Computer, will be Read more…
It’s perhaps fitting that in the middle of the summer, when water management is a common challenge, that a paper in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) offers more proof that life as we know it can’t occur without water. Using Ohio Supercomputing Center resources, researchers have shown the critical role water plays in actively guiding protein folding and movement. “For a long time, scientists have been trying to figure out how water interacts with proteins…
One could be forgiven for experiencing a bit of hopeful, skepticism in response to U.S. President Barack Obama Administration’s statement in May regarding re-energizing the “War Against Cancer.” The war against cancer is a many-decades old effort with mixed results – great progress in many areas but matched with disappointment in others. Winning the war Read more…
Genomic sequencing – that is, rapid sequencing – is instrumental to diagnosing and treating critically ill patients, and managing the high data volumes involved in genomics is essential to the process. Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, MO, (354 beds, not-for-profit, treating children from birth through the age of 21) operates what it says is the world’s first whole genome sequencing center in a pediatric setting, where physicians, clinical laboratory scientists, molecular geneticists, bioinformaticians and software engineers work to sequence and analyze rare inherited diseases.
Once again, storage system supplier DataDirect Networks has the top market share – roughly 70 percent – in the TOP500, said the company today. This is the eighth consecutive year DDN has been the top storage system supplier to the Top500, according to Molly Rector, DDN CMO. Storage is the fast growing segment of the Read more…
June 27 — The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) will be changing its name to the “Earlham Institute” on June 27 2016. The Earlham Institute (EI) will build upon the research foundation developed as TGAC and continue to help answer the most fundamental questions in biological sciences today, from its home on Norwich Research Park. The institute’s genomics Read more…
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), now about eight months into its transition as a separate entity, retained the prestige of fielding the most systems of any vendor on the Top500 list announced at the ISC2016. HPE had 127 systems (25.4 percent) though the number was down from 155 just six months ago. Other ISC news included Read more…
NVIDIA seems to be mounting a vigorous effort to dethrone the CPU as the leader of the processor pack for HPC and demanding datacenter workloads. That’s a tall order. Introduction at ISC 2016 of a PCIe-based version of is new Tesla P100 card is one element in the strategy. It should ease the upgrade path Read more…
SC15 was sort of a muted launch party for OpenHPC – the nascent effort to develop a ‘plug-and-play’ software framework for HPC. There seemed to be widespread agreement the idea had merit, not a lot of knowledge of details, and some wariness because Intel was a founding member and vocal advocate. Next week, ISC16 will mark the next milestone for OpenHPC, which has since grown into a full-fledged Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and today released version 1.0.1 of OpenHPC (build and test tools).
Who crunches more data faster, wins. It’s this drive that cuts through and clarifies the essence of the evolutionary spirit in the computer industry, the dual desire to get to real time with bigger and bigger chunks of data. The locomotive: HPC technologies adapted to enterprise mission-critical data analytics. With its memory capacity of up Read more…
Roughly three months into early operations, the Bridges computing resources being deployed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is bearing fruit. Designed to accommodate traditional HPC and big data analytics, Bridges had supported 245 projects as of May 26. This ramping up of the NSF-funded ($9.6 M) Bridges project is an important step in delivering practical Read more…
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