Argonne to Provide Use of Blue Gene for Life Science Computing, Other Projects

NEW YORK, Aug. 19 (GenomeWeb News) - The US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory has added a 91-teraflop Blue Gene supercomputer to the computational resources it makes available to scientists under the DOE's INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) program, IBM said this week.

Argonne and IBM are "developing a plan for researchers to request computation time on the IBM Blue Gene system," IBM said. The system, nicknamed BGW, is located at IBM's Watson Research Laboratory.

According to the DOE, the INCITE program "The program seeks computationally intensive research projects of large scale... that can make high-impact scientific advances through the use of a large allocation of computer time and data storage." Proposals are accepted from industry as well as academic research groups, and can be for one to three years.

Prospective uses for the supercomputer capability include applications in biotechnology as well as aerospace, automotive engineering, chemistry, energy, and physics, the DOE said.

A protein-folding project at the University of Washington was among three INCITE awards last year. The project was granted 2 million processor-hours on a 6,656-processor 7.3-teraflop IBM supercomputer at the DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.

Information about the 2006 INCITE program is available here.