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DELL HELPS UB UNVEIL SUPERCOMPUTER ARRAY
Published on September 3, 2002
Author: STEPHEN WATSON - News Staff Reporter
© The Buffalo News Inc.
Billionaire Michael Dell is in the Buffalo area today to help the University at Buffalo unveil a powerful new computer cluster provided by the company that he founded and continues to run.
The $13 million installation will crunch genetic data for the school's Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, and UB and Dell officials are raving about its computing capacity. The 2,000 interconnected DellPowerEdge servers that make up the cluster weigh 80,000 pounds and, combined, can perform 5.8 trillion operations per second. Put another way, the cluster can process in one day work that would take a standard personal computer 11 years. It increases the computing power of UB's Center for Computational Research by tenfold. "It's some huge new level of computing," UB Provost Elizabeth D. Capaldi said. "It's a good thing for us. It's a good thing for UB and Buffalo." The cluster was installed in the center in August. It's hooked up by an ethernet connection from UB's campus in Amherst to the building on Washington Street in Buffalo where Jeffrey Skolnick, the bioinformatics director, and other researchers will be working for the next several years. UB used federal and state grant money and a co-investment from Dell to pay for the computer cluster, Miller said. Dell, other company officials and UB officers will unveil the cluster at a news conference at 3 p.m. today in the computer research center on the North Campus. The computer cluster is only the latest piece of UB's bioinformatics center to fall into place over the past 10 months. The center is a high-tech medical research endeavor that's attracted $290 million from state, federal and business sources. Officials, including Gov. George E. Pataki and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, say the center could produce millions of dollars in economic impact, thousands of jobs and new advances in medicine. So where does the computer cluster fit into this? Researchers at the bioinformatics center are crunching the massive amounts of data generated by the human genome project. Scientists have the list of all of the pieces of the human genome, but they don't know what each part does, said Dean Kline, a Dell spokesman. He compared it to having a list of the names of the parts of a car, such as the door handle or the carburetor, but not knowing their shape or what they do. Finding out what each piece of the human genome does, Kline said, is "the first step in getting us toward individualized medicine" -- tailoring drugs to each person for maximum effectiveness. Previously, only a few elite universities that could afford to purchase supercomputers were able to conduct this research, Dell said in a phone interview late last week. But using a cluster of interconnected Pentium processors -- the kind that are installed in Dell's desktop computers in homes and offices around the country -- multiplies their computing power in a way that's affordable for universities and research centers, Dell said. "You can do things that a couple of years ago were unimaginable," he said. UB's cluster has 2,000 servers, which contain 4,120 Pentium processors and 2 trillion bytes of RAM, or random access memory, Miller said. The servers are connected to each other by ethernet, the standard connection in an office, he said. The processors are running the Linux operating system, which is a Unix-based system. Dell has installed its computer clusters at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University, among other institutions. "We've installed hundreds of these clusters. (But UB's) would be one of the larger ones, not only for us but in the world," Dell said. "And the amazing thing is we got this up and running in 60 days." e-mail: swatson@buffnews.com<
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