© 1999 by Oxford University Press
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 91, No. 14, 1191A-1191,
July 21, 1999
© 1999 Oxford University Press
NEWS |
National Cancer Institute Leases New Supercomputer
The National Cancer Institute announced recently the signing of a 3-year, $6.5 million agreement with Silicon Graphics, Inc. to lease a Cray SV1 supercomputer. The new machine will be operated at NCI's Advanced Biomedical Supercomputing Center in Frederick, Md., where it will replace a Cray Y-MP supercomputer that has been in use there since 1991.
According to Jacob Maizel, Jr., Ph.D., chief of NCI's Laboratory of Experimental and Computational Biology and a founder of the Frederick center, the supercomputer has a combined computing power of 115 gigaflops, or enough capacity to process in one day a computational task that would take a high-end Pentium computer about 4 years to complete. A gigaflop is a measure of a computer's speed that, in the terminology of the trade, equals one billion floating point operations per second.
Maizel said the new supercomputer, which should be fully operational by the end of the year, provides about 48 times more computing capacity than the previous Cray supercomputer. It also has about 96 times the disk and memory capacity than previously and features 96 processors, a plus in simulating biological problems that require large amounts of computer memory.
"The Cray SV1 represents a significant resource for the entire biological research community," said Stan Burt, Ph.D., ABSC director. "It is a powerful machine with lots of memory, and users will find it to be a valuable tool in sorting out the functions of the genes and proteins involved in their diseases of interest."
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