The Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel
Mackay, Richards et al., Nature
North Carolina State University's Trudy Mackay and her colleagues present the Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel, "a community resource for analysis of population genomics and quantitative traits."
Vanderbilt Adds GPU Cluster
July 30, 2010
Vanderbilt University's Advanced Computing Center for Research & Education is using a $390,000 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant, along with $150,000 from the National Science Foundation, to build a GPU cluster. ACCRE currently supplies the campus with roughly 3,000 processing cores for a total of 17.5 teraflops in computing power, but researchers are hoping that the addition of a GPU cluster will enable them to further accelerate current projects-after they tweak their code to fully take advantage of the graphics cards of course.
"The GPU cluster represents a new technology for ACCRE," says Alan Tackett, ACCRE’s technical director. "It has the potential to transform the kinds of scientific problems some of our best researchers can address. But what I like most about the cluster is that it was conceived and acquired through a grassroots effort by researchers who knew what the technology could do and understood that they could use it to address new questions at the forefront of their fields. To me, that is what ACCRE is all about."
Projects such as machine learning methods for drug discovery, neurological experiments that aim to model how learning takes place, and nanotube design, are a few of the many research areas that ACCRE hopes will benefit from GPU technology. In order to make sure this happens, the powers that be at Vanderbilt have acknowledge the not-so-trivial task that is porting code to GPUs by doling out a $138,000 grant to help cover the salaries of ACCRE staff programmers who will no doubt be putting in some serious overtime as the GPU cluster gets up-and-running.