The Bioinformatics Laboratory at National University of Ireland in Maynooth has installed a cluster of 42 Intel-based servers running Linux to support its research activities.
Installed with the assistance of Datapac and IBM the cluster is made up of IBM’s eServer xSeries X330 1U Intel based servers. It comprises 84 processors, 1.7Tbyte of disk space and 32Gbyte of memory.
There are several research projects currently being undertaken by the Laboratory. They include researching the bacteria that cause TB and meningitis as well as a new project which will investigate the organism that causes malaria.
‘We are trying to figure out what are the genes in these organisms that are most important to it that make it unique’, said Dr. James McInerney, Director of Bioinformatics Laboratory. ‘We are doing this computationally by looking at similarities of one gene to another and by teasing about a huge amount of experimental information that is freely available on the Web.’
The Bioinformatics Laboratory is also looking into the human genome sequence. ‘We are comparing the human and mouse sequence to try to quantify fairly accurately what the differences and similarities are between the human genes and mouse genes and the bits of DNA that control genes’, continues McInerney. ‘It is not a trivial task. You need powerful computers when you start comparing this type of data. Because of the amount of statistical analysis that the researchers do here on data, we needed a data management system that was powerful enough for our researchers to carry out computationally intensive research.’
The cluster is involved in everything from research to teaching. NUI Maynooth is the first University in Europe to offer an under graduate degree course in computational biology and bioinformatics.
15/01/2003
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