[ Thanks to Jonathan
M. Prigot for this link. ]
“Blackstone Technology Group Inc. is set to announce today that
it will build a high-performance ”compute farm” for Biogen Inc.
to help the Cambridge biotechnology giant accelerate its drug
discovery and development efforts. By pooling the power of an
entire network, the company said, a compute farm can increase the
speed and capacity of an information system to run analyses and
programs that require tremendous amounts of memory and time.”
“Every drug development company wants to use the influx of
genomic data to bring drugs to market faster and cheaper,” said
William Van Etten, the principal bioinformaticist with Blackstone
Technology Group and formerly a researcher at the Whitehead
Institute. “But the information is doubling every six months.”
“The farm that Blackstone has designed for Biogen will
increase the company’s computing capacity almost tenfold – from 18
CPUs (central processing units) to 170, Van Etten
said. The farm will connect Biogen’s computer hardware to a new
Linux operating system and additional Intel-based processors.
The farm’s capacity can be increased by adding as few or as many
central processing units as needed rather than in the predetermined
jumps mandated in a standard mainframe environment, Fuchs said,
allowing Biogen to customize the farm to match its needs.”