[Bioclusters] HPC consortium for bioinformatics and life science research

[Glen Otero]

Terra Soft (http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com) has initiated an HPC  
consortium for life sciences and bioinformatics research. The  
consortium's primary goal is to provide researchers remote access to  
a large Cell-based Linux cluster to augment their scientific and  
software development research. Access to the cluster will be free of  
charge for university and DoE laboratories.

The enthusiastic response to Terra Soft's formation of a consortium  
designed to drive adoption of the Cell processor has precipitated the  
planning of a Cell "Hack-a-thon" at Terra Soft headquarters in late  
January. The Hack-a-thon is designed to quickly achieve a critical  
mass of bioinformatics applications ported to the Cell processor,  
which will help increase consortium participation, membership, and  
traction with sponsors.

Terra Soft believes that other processor technologies like graphics  
cards (GPUs) will also make important contributions to HPC.  
Therefore, secondary goals of the consortium include providing  
RapidMind (http://www.rapidmind.net/) and PeakStream (http:// 
www.peakstreaminc.com/) software tools to consortium members so that  
they can increase application performance by porting them to run on  
powerful graphics cards (GPUs). Plans to include application  
acceleration with GPUs in the Hack-a-thon curriculum are underway.

Terra Soft will be able to provide consortium members remote access  
to PlayStation3s in the next few weeks so that they may begin code  
porting efforts to the Cell processor. In fact, the Hack-a-thon will  
utilize PlayStation3s and other Cell-based hardware during its  
focused code porting party.

If you are interested in joining the consortium, send me an email at  
gotero at terrasoftsolutions.com saying as much, and I will add you to  
the consortium mailing list. Once you are on the mailing list, you  
will be given the address to the consortium website, as well as a  
username and password. On the website you will find more information  
about the consortium, the Hack-a-thon, and how to join both.

Glen