HP

Australia's Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative hosts the fastest life science supercomputer in the world, according to the most recent version of the Top500 list released earlier this month.

Two supercomputers dedicated to life science research — both from Japan — have joined the ranks of the world's fastest supercomputers, according to the twice-yearly Top500 list released earlier this month.

By Bernadette Toner

Supercomputers at Janelia Farm and the University of Tokyo's Laboratory for Systems Biology and Medicine did not meet the 40.1-teraflop benchmark for inclusion in the 37th edition of the twice-yearly ranking.

HP's investment will support data-driven science that will explore ways in which analysis can be done on clinical data stored in electronic medical records, a hospital spokesperson said.

Three life science computers — at MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Genome Science Center at the University of British Columbia, and the Laboratory for Systems Biology and Medicine at the University of Tokyo — beat the 31.1-teraflop benchmark for inclusion in the latest edition of the twice-yearly list.

The new systems include an 8,640-core system at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Center for the Study of Systems Biology and a 4,000-core Dell system called "Gladiator" that was installed on the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Campus.

The 97.1-teraflop, 18,176-core "Chinook" HP cluster at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory remains the top life science machine on the twice-yearly ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers.

HP said that SBI is using the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage system, which has storage capacity in the "multipetabyte" range.

A 5,760-core Sun Microsystems blade system at the University of Tokyo's Human Genome Center is the second-fastest life science computer on the latest Top500 list. It follows the 97.1-teraflop, 18,176-core "Chinook" HP cluster at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, which holds the No. 34 spot in the current list.