NEW YORK, Dec 18 - IBM and NuTec Sciences of Atlanta said Monday they had agreed to build a 7.5-teraflop computing cluster, which will be used by NuTec’s life science unit to study genes’ role in disease.
The computing cluster, which will have a processing capacity of 7.5 trillion calculations per second, will be the fastest non-governmental system, the companies said in a statement.
Financial terms of the deal were not announced.
" The NuTec Sciences supercomputing center will be a model for using information technology to advance medical research," Caroline Kovac, vice president, IBM Life Sciences, said in a statement. " NuTec Sciences needed a partner with both e-business and life sciences expertise, as well as leading data integration software and a highly scaleable system for enormous amounts of complex genetic data.”
The supercomputing cluster will consist of 1,250 IBM eServer p640 devices running IBM's DB2 Universal Database, supported by 2.5 terabytes of memory, 50 terabytes of online disk storage and a high-bandwidth networking infrastructure.
IBM software for web application serving, information portals, and data integration will also be included in the system. NuTec Sciences will use the system to manage, mine and integrate genetic data from a wide variety of sources, and share this information via the Internet with the global life sciences community. It will also use it to distribute NIH-patented algorithms for analyzing disease-causing gene combinations.
NuTec Sciences' life sciences unit is a bioinformatics company that provides everything from desktop software to parallel computing to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.