PR: Life Sciences Industry Turns to Linux and IBM

The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) has selected IBM to
provide its infrastructure technology. ISB will use IBM servers,
storage and data integration products to support its research on
protein-protein interactions to better understand and predict
diseases, and identify potential preventions and treatments.

Through the agreement, announced today at the BIO 2002
Conference, IBM and ISB will also explore research collaborations
in systems biology. ISB is a leader in this emerging field, which
uses computer technology to model not just the functions of
individual genes and proteins, but their complex interactions
within a cell, tissue, organ or whole organism.

“This research is the essence of what ISB is all about,” said
Co-founder and President Dr. Leroy Hood. “You can’t learn about
systems by studying one gene or protein at a time. The information
from genes and proteins is complex and requires tremendous
computational firepower. The technology framework from IBM will
give us the power we need to quickly analyze and integrate the
data, and accelerate our research efforts.”

ISB is replacing products from non-IBM vendors with the IBM
systems, including a 64-node IBM eServer xSeries 1300 Cluster, with
two micropressors per node. This highly scalable, prepackaged
cluster will be used to process data from a network of mass
spectrometers, which identify and analyze proteins — critical
steps in the process of determining protein-protein
interactions.

“As we looked over the landscape of various computer companies
to determine which ones we should be working with, IBM was clearly
our first choice,” said Professor George Lake, ISB faculty member.
“It was critical to have a technology partner who understood our
research goals. IBM does everything — they are a leader in
high-performance computing, Linux clusters, storage and
hierarchical data management, and all of this ties back to people
in IBM’s research labs working on basic technologies, data
federation and bioinformatics.”

ISB researchers will use IBM’s DiscoveryLink software to quickly
and seamlessly integrate proteomics data in disparate formats and
file types and from a variety of public and private data
sources.

Deployment of ISB’s new information technology infrastructure is
expected to be complete in the third quarter of 2002.