Customer Needs
Accompanying the growth in the research areas of Genetics, Proteinology, Bio-informatics, Computer-assisted Drug Design, computer technology application within the field of biomedical research has also flourished and becomes increasingly important. Today, the thriving growth of Bio-informatics, a combination of Life Sciences and Information Technologies, is inseparable to the application of high performance computer platform, technology and methodology.

As a result, Beijing Institute of Medical Informatics set-up a high performance computer system to kick-off the research development in the areas of Biomedicine, Bio-informatics, Bio-computation, to offer computation services to both internal and external research personnel, to cooperatively apply for related research topics, and to provide a powerful computation platform for domestic Bio-informatics research institutions.

Galactic's Solution
In November 2001, Galactic Computing, in cooperation with Beijing Institute of Radiation Medicine, successfully installed our 1.5 teraflop Supercomputing Blade System at the newly established Biomedical Supercomputing Research Center.

Hardware Configuration:132 computation nodes, 1 log-on node and I/O node. Each node has two 2.8GHz P4 Xeon CPU, 2GB memory, 36GB local hard disk. The system is configured with two 2TB high speed storage. Moreover, all nodes within the whole system are connected using 20Gbps InfiniBand high speed crossover switches. Comparable to traditional MPP- configured supercomputers, the system can satisfy high volume computation and high performance collaborative computation applications. With actual computation capacity over 1 teraflop per second, it is the fastest and most efficient computation system installed in China's biomedical research institute today.

System Softwares and Development Tools:An optimized version of RedHat Linux AS 3.1 was installed onto the system, MPI development tool set (compiler, library, run module), computer resources management, workload assignment, performance monitoring, network files sharing, collaborative environment softwares, etc. are used to formulate a single system image (SSI). Through simple training, the center was able to migrate close to 20 biomedical applications within a 2-week period.

Total Effect
In this particular set-up, Galactic has optimized the Supercomputer Blade configurations in such a way to fully let out its hardware and software performance potential. Beijing Institute of Medical Informatics' researcher has installed onto the system protocols Blat and EstAlign for DNA transcription and translocation analyses. Only 7.5 hours was used to complete comparing over 5 millions human EST sequences with the UniGene database by running 56 nodes collaboratively on Blat whereas the same task run on a regular dual-CPU server will take as long as 3 weeks time.

Besides the above research, another research running lastpgpa and a nervous system based framework prognostic protocol completes 160 thousands gene sequences mutation comparison and framework prognosis within 3 days whereas the same task run on a regular PC server will take 6 months.

Please refer to <Galactic Supercomputing Blade System Application in Bio-informatics> issued by Beijing Health Bureau and Beijing Institute of Medical Informatics on the capabilities, characteristics, and features of such application.