University of Missouri Adds SGI Computational Tools

NEW YORK, Feb. 7 (GenomeWeb News) - The Bioinformatics Consortium at the University of Missouri recently purchased high performance computing technology and an Infinite Storage SAN from Silicon Graphics, SGI announced today.

SGI said that the systems, which include an SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 with Intel and Itanium processors running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with the SGI ProPack software suite, and an 8TB SGI SAN with InfiniteStorage shared filesystem CXFS, were installed in November and made available to researchers in mid-December.

Details of the sale were held until after SGI announced quarterly earnings, SGI told GenomeWeb News.

Financial details on the purchase were not released.

"We've run some benchmarks, and jobs that were taking about 50 to 60 hours on the HP Alpha SC system actually took about 2 to 6 hours on a similarly configured SGI Altix," said Gordon Springer, scientific director of the bioinformatics consortium.

Springer said the new technology would be used, in part, for data analysis as UM researchers attempt to customize genetically modified pig hearts for transplant in humans.