[en] The SGI POWER CHALLENGEarray TM represents a hierarchical supercomputer because it combines distributed and shared memory technology. We present two projects, Europort and GeneCrunch, that took advantage of such a configuration. In Europort we performed scalability demonstrations up to 64 processors with applications relevant to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. GeneCrunch, a project in bioinformatics, performed an analysis of the whole yeast genome using the software system GeneQuiz. This project showcased the future demands of HPC in pharmaceutical industries in tackling analysis of fast growing volumes of sequence information. GeneQuiz, an automated software system for large-scale genome analysis developed at the EMBL /EBI , aims at predicting the function of new genes by using an automated, rigorous, rule-based system to process the results of sequence analysis and database searches to build databases of annotations and predictions. In GeneCrunch more than 6,000 proteins from baker's yeast, for which the complete genomic sequence was completed in 1996, were analyzed on a SGI® POWER CHALLENGEarray with 64 processors (R8000® at 90MHz) in three days rather than the seven months predicted for a normal workstation
[University of Luxembourg > Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) > >]
