Life Science Research on Solaris

People often ask me why I am so passionate about High Performance Computing. It is simple. Have you known anyone who has benefited from a drug that wasn't available 10 years ago? Do you know anyone who is suffering from a disease that some day may be cured by a drug being developed today? HPC has a huge impact on our ability to create new drugs. The system you are reading this blog on probably has more compute power than was available to the majority of life science researchers 10 years ago. The HPC system we are installing at TACC will have 60,000 AMD processor cores and be roughly 60,000 times more powerful than a single core desktop today (albeit the standard laptop or desktop has at least two cores these days). But what do you do if you don't have access to TACC's supercomputer and your desktop isn't fast enough for the life science problems you are working on?

This is exactly the problem that the Bio Cluster Grid developed at Sun's Asia Pacific Science and Technology Center in Singapore aims to solve. The Bio Cluster Grid is designed to:

  • To enable biologists harness the power of a cluster grid through a web interface
  • To provide a portal interface to command line applications
  • To evenly distribute jobs in a cluster

    More than 20 of the most popular open source bioinformatics applications are made available on the Bio-ClusterGrid through the portal, which greatly enhances application usability. Biologists access the portal either through a browser in SunRay Thin Clients in the access tier or through any browser enabled device. The Grid Engine software provides the resource management mechanism to schedule all the bioinformatics applications to run on the cluster of execution servers.

    The Bio Cluster Grid sprung out of work done by APSTC to address the original outbreak of the SARS virus in Asia, when APSTC researchers quickly helped Singapore's life science researchers setup a grid infrastructure that allowed them to decode the SARS genome. Today, a complete Solaris life science cluster can be installed in just a few hours, work that typically would take researchers days or weeks to setup. There are both Solaris and Linux versions of the Bio Cluster Grid available for free download as well as a version packaged to work with the popular Rocks software.

    If you are a life science researcher, or a sys admin supporting life science researchers, you should definitely check out the Bio Cluster Grid. And if you don't have your own cluster hardware to install it on, most of the Bio Cluster Grid packages are available for use on Sun Grid, where you can sign up for a free account and get access to the Bio Cluster Grid and many other grid applications (limited number of free use hours). Sun has already donated 1000's of hours of Sun Grid compute time to universities who have made use of Bio Cluster Gird and other applications.

    The latest Bio Cluster Grid Version 1.5 was just released this week. It has many updated applications, and easier installation and use than ever. My congratulations to the APSTC team on the latest release. Researchers around the world are already using the Bio Cluster Grid on Solaris today. One of them might be creating a cure today that will in the future help someone you know live a better life.

    This blog entry dedicated to my good family friend, A.P., who's mother passed away this morning after a long struggle with cancer.

    • Posted on: Aug 10, 2007

    Posted by: marchamilton

    Category: General

    Tags: none

    Permanent link to this entry

    Comments:

    Post a Comment:
    Comments are closed for this entry.

    This blog copyright 2009 by marchamilton