NCI Leases Supercomputer From SGI to Bring More Power to Cancer Research

FREDERICK, Md.--The US National Cancer Institute announced a three-year $6.5 million agreement with Silicon Graphics to lease a Cray SV1 supercomputer, which is expected to be operational at the institute by the end of the year. The new machine will be operated at NCI's Advanced Biomedical Computing Center here, where it will replace a Cray Y-MP supercomputer that has been in use there since 1991. The new machine provides 48 times the computing capacity of the supercomputer it replaces, said Jacob Maizel, chief of NCI's laboratory of experimental and computational biology and a founder of the computing center. Richard Klausner, director of NCI, said the institute decided to lease the Cray SV1 as cancer researchers worldwide have become more interested in using the latest high-speed computational methods in their studies. The institutes center is the only supercomputing center in the US available to the public and focused exclusively on biological research, according to a center official.