NewsForge: Linux Cluster Will Help Research Treatment of Cancer, AIDS

“Researchers at the University at Buffalo, the State University
of New York, have fired up a 2,000-node, 4,000 processor Linux
cluster and hope the cluster’s help in studying the human genome
will lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, Alzheimer’s
and AIDS.

“The cluster at the Buffalo Center of Excellence in
Bioinformatics at SUNY Buffalo went online in mid-August and is
often running at full capacity even though the set-up team is still
doing some minor tweaking, says Jeffrey Skolnick, the soon-to-be
director of the bioinformatics center…

“Skolnick can rattle off all kinds of interesting statistics
about the cluster. It will enable researchers to predict protein
structure and run large-scale computer simulations, and work that
would’ve taken 1,000 years on on processor will be done in three to
six months on the cluster. ‘We’re not just trying to collect
computers, which is a nice little hobby,’ he says. ‘It enables us
to do science we couldn’t do elsewhere…'”

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