Partnership seeks to build supercomputer for proteomics

URL: http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v409/n6819/full/409446a0_fs.html

Date accessed: 04 February 2001

Nature 409, 446 - 447 (2001) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

25 January 2001

[WASHINGTON] Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, Compaq Computer Corporation and Celera Genomics last week joined forces to build a supercomputer tailored to proteomics.

The Department of Energy will provide $10 million over four years to build a machine that can perform 100 trillion operations per second. Project leaders hope that, with some technological breakthroughs, the machine could eventually run ten times faster than that.

Although comparisons to another supercomputer currently in development — IBM's Blue Gene (see Nature 402, 705; 1999)— seem inevitable, they may not be completely appropriate. Each machine's performance is measured differently, and the two computers have been designed for different tasks. Blue Gene may ultimately be the faster computer, but the newly proposed machine will probably have more memory.

Speed is more important for Blue Gene because it is designed for problems that require many simultaneous calculations, such as the simulation of protein folding. Memory is more important for the new machine, its designers say, as it will be used to process huge volumes of protein and genome data.

Category: 54. Proteomics

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