eWeek: Compute farms yield a fine crop of data

“The human genome, contained in a set of 23 chromosomes, is
estimated to contain some 3.16 billion nucleo tides. The scientists
who dig through that mountain of data to discern the mysteries of
life demand an equally massive amount of raw, number-crunching
power….”

“Compute farms are close relatives of server farms, which often
underpin e-commerce and Web-hosting applications. But, while server
farms are intended to process a large number of short transactions,
compute farms typically process a small number of large jobs that
can be easily split into parallel processes. The basic components
of a compute farm consist of a bank of PCs, often two- or four-way
boxes running Pentium or low-end RISC processors. Biogen’s farm
features dual-processor Pentium PCs running Red Hat Inc.’s Red Hat
Linux….”

“It’s a very generic Intel-based platform,” Fuchs said. “As long
as [an application] runs on Linux, we don’t have to parallelize the
underlying code. We write wrappers around the applications, and the
wrappers break the processing jobs into small pieces. The central
server then just collects the results.”

Complete Story