The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) is a leading research university. Many of the university’s health sciences groups work on National Institutes of Health (NIH)–sponsored projects to advance medical research in areas such as protein interactions, human-lung functions, and disease diagnosis. The groups typically use high-performance applications for modeling and simulation, but they wanted dedicated and specialized computing resources to speed research.

Although UNC-CH considered other vendors, the university turned to Sun to help design a high-performance biomedical image analysis system because it decided that Sun could provide a more customized solution and better support for image-intensive applications.

Russell M. Taylor II, research professor with a joint appointment in the departments of Computer Science, Physics and Astronomy, and Applied and Materials Sciences at UNC, commented, "Implementing a high-performance computing solution from Sun Microsystems gave us the ability to move biomedical research forward at a faster pace."

The UNC-CH grid - called the Biomedical Analysis and Simulation Supercomputer (BASS) system - consists of 17 Sun Fire X4600 M2 Servers, each with sixteen 2.8GHz AMD Opteron processors. An additional Sun Fire X4600 M2 was installed for backup, and another was installed as a file server attached to a Sun StorageTek 6140 array and a Sun StorageTek SL500 modular library system. The grid also includes 45 Sun Ultra 40 M2 Workstations with NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards and externally attached NVIDIA QuadroPlex Model IV visual computing systems. All the nodes run Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.0, except for the backup server, which runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. The grid is networked by a Qlogic InfiniBand interconnect for low-latency massively parallel processing. Sun Grid Engine version 6.1 software is used to tailor grid resources for different research activities.

“Users tell us how excited they are to be able to do things a hundred times faster than before,” said Taylor. “They can get work done to beat a deadline or get a paper out on time - it’s very gratifying.”

More Information

University Enhances Biomedical Research with HPC System from Sun

Sun Fire X4600 M2 Servers

Sun Ultra 40 M2 Workstations

Sun StorageTek 6140 Array

Sun StorageTek SL500 Modular Library System

Sun Grid Engine

Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager

Sun Customer Ready Program [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter