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Supercomputer Ranked Among Top in the World

High performance computer cluster allows fast analysis of huge masses of data

 

The recently installed “supercomputer” at The University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences at Houston (SHIS) has been ranked #260 among the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world. The TOP500 project was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing.

The supercomputer, actually a high performance computer cluster, is the equivalent of 180 computers linked together with a central storage system and a backup system, said Jiajie Zhang, Ph.D., associate dean for research at SHIS. It allows speedy, parallel computation and analysis of great masses of data to be performed in a timely manner.

“To begin with, it will be shared primarily by the research and education areas at our school and researchers at other health science center schools,” said Zhang, who coordinates management of the supercomputer. “Potentially, researchers outside of UT will want to use it,” Zhang said.

The supercomputer cluster and its accessories, replacing instrumentation lost during Tropical Storm Allison, cost about $500,000. Funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid for the purchase.

Accessories include a 3-D virtual reality subsystem, a multimedia subsystem, a 128-channel EEG system and several packages of software for mathematical and computational modeling.

“At this time we have three primary uses for the supercomputer,” Zhang explained:

• Intensive computational projects, such as modeling of 3-D molecular structures, the processing of biomedical imaging and biosignals – which requires hours of computation even with this kind of cluster, drug design and discovery, and the modeling of drug delivery to the human body.
• Real time, large-scale database processing for the Center for Biosecurity Informatics, a collaborative effort of SHIS; the Office of Biotechnology headed by S. Ward Casscells, M.D., the UT Health Science Center at Houston’s vice president for biotechnology; and the Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Preparedness, led by Scott Lillibridge, M.D., at the UT School of Public Health at Houston. “We will have to collect data in real time from many different places – hospital emergency rooms, clinics, schools, law enforcement agencies, veterinary clinics,” Zhang said. “The cluster will store the information and perform large-scale analyses of the data.”
• 3-D visualization in real time – for a virtual reality kind of research. A large projection screen and special goggles are available for this type of project.

“We believe that other researchers at the health science center, such as Hong Zhou, Ph.D., associate professor, Structural and Computational Biology, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and Jack Byrne, Ph.D., chair, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, both at the Medical School; and Eric Boerwinkle, Ph.D., director of the Human Genetics Center at the School of Public Health, are among those who could benefit from the availability of this supercomputer,” Zhang said.

“Eventually, we hope many people will use this facility to generate more grants, which in turn will support the maintenance, upgrading and eventual replacement of this facility,” Zhang said. He is establishing an advisory committee to set policies for the supercomputer, with a goal to make it cost neutral.

Also, Jack W. Smith, M.D., Ph.D., interim dean of SHIS, envisions that the supercomputer potentially could be part of a Houston biogrid network, linking clusters at the health science center, Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University and the University of Houston. “Researchers could use available distributed cluster capacity no matter where it is,” Smith said.

— By Pamela Lewis, Public Affairs