The Bio-ClusterGrid is the first of many deployment architectures that realizes the benefit of the BioBox initiative. The Bio-ClusterGrid is a package of open-source Grid Engine, Sun JavaTM System Portal Server, open-source bioinformatics applications and integration scripts. The whole package is aimed to set up a decent size bioinformatics cluster in a matter of hours.

An impressively ambitious project in itself – cataloging the species living in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park – has expanded under the auspices of the Polistes Foundation to compile a knowledge base for the study of education, health, agriculture, economic development and conservation worldwide. Sun servers running the Solaris TM Operating System (Solaris OS) power the project.

The Blueprint Initiative at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, employs the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND) to enumerate and study proteins and their interactions for research into the treatment of HIV, cancer and other diseases. The Institute is the world's largest protein interaction database research facility. Sun provides the IT infrastructure.

Dr. Stefan Unger, business development manager, computational biology in global education and research, science and engineering at Sun, praised the reliability of Sun technology and how it can help Malaysian biologists avoid the difficulties that have beset other adopters of Linux clusters.

The Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Data Center at Dartmouth College maintains a repository of image files of use to neuroscientists. The files are accessed and shared, creating a need for a storage solution that can grow as the archive needs grow. The center turned to Sun and StorageTek.