IBM has supplied two major government-funded research projects and 13 departments at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) with Linux-based supercomputers.
A €9m multidisciplinary research programme in biomolecular science, a science Foundation Ireland-funded nanotechnology programme and university departments including biochemistry, computer science, mathematics, microbiology, pharmaceutical chemistry and physics are using the computing power of the 80-node IBM eServer xSeries 335 Linux cluster. The system can be expanded to more than 16Tbyte and 112 drives to support growing storage requirements for data-intensive applications.
The contract was awarded by the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing (TCHPC), which co-ordinates the advanced computing projects and manages high performance computing systems at the university. ‘What we were looking to get was as much computing power as we could for the right price,’ Audrey Crosbie, business and development manager for the centre, told ComputerScope. ‘IBM was chosen on the basis that its price was very competitive and the system had the power and reliability that our researchers demand,’ she said.
The physical sciences departments at TCD are working on methods to understand structure and processes in complex physical systems such as materials, foams, and molecules. The biomolecular sciences programme is addressing such research areas as biomolecular modelling, drug design and structural biology.
Alongside the Linux cluster, the College also purchased a FAStT700 storageserver to support the Linux cluster system. The IBM storage server can be expanded as storage needs expand based on a pay-as-you-grow configuration to meet unexpected growth needs, according to IBM.
‘A second larger tender, to be awarded towards the end of 2004, will be for advanced visualisation equipment, which will be particularly useful in the area of bioscience,’ said Crosbie. ‘This technology will be used to create 3D images of research results that will be viewed using goggles,’ she said.
20/09/04
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