Department of Energy in the US announces Research and Development agreement between Sandia Labs and Celera Genomics with Compaq technology

"The key aspect of this relationship is the simultaneous provision of algorithmic support, design of actual application software, and development of the system platform by three organizations with world-class competence in their respective areas," said Bill Blake, Vice President of High Performance Technical Computing at Compaq. "This effort is a direct response to the challenge by Celera's president, J. Craig Venter, who said that even the most powerful of today's supercomputers do not meet the needs of his company's work in the genomic era. Our intent with this alliance is to apply the same full system modeling approach to bioscience that has been so successfully applied to physical sciences in the DOE/NNSA Stockpile Stewardship program."

J. Craig Venter, Celera's president and chief scientific officer, said, "Just three years ago, the computational needs of biology were thought to be minor and irrelevant to the computing industry. Today, biologists are setting the pace of development for the industry. At Celera, we take pride in excelling in the application of computers to biology and the new era in medicine that is developing as a result. As Compaq and the Department of Energy move toward creation of the next generation of supercomputers for defense purposes, we look forward to helping both groups develop the new machines, software and algorithms to advance life sciences."

Said Bill Camp, Sandia director of computation, computers and mathematics, "Delivering affordable and scalable computer architectures is the foundation of modern supercomputing and has been the focus of Sandia research for more than a decade. Our knowledge will be useful because understanding the complexity of the human genome requires manipulating ever vaster amounts of information, using more advanced computing technologies than was required even for the assembly of the human genome itself. So we view this relationship as strategic for our continuing missions as a DOE/NNSA national security laboratory, look forward to providing world-class expertise in parallel algorithms and systems software in the cause of human health, and welcome the opportunity to play a role in developing what may be some of the most exciting science in recent human history."

The alliance will use Compaq Alpha processors connected in massively parallel configuration with extremely high bandwidth, and low latency mesh interconnects.

Compaq and Sandia will collaborate on the development of system hardware and software. Both have extensive experience with supercomputers based on Alpha.

The alliance will focus on future generations of the AlphaServer SC series, and the goal is to create a prototype in the 2004 time frame.

Celera and Sandia will concentrate on creation of advanced algorithms for biology research, and on new visualization technologies for analyzing the massive quantities of experimental data from high-throughput instruments.

All three groups will contribute to integrating the system hardware and software and on optimizing performance.

Driving the design for this next-generation supercomputer are anticipated computational and data management requirements for proteomics. These requirements are expected to be vastly more complicated than the pattern recognition and assembly operations required to sequence the human genome. Researchers are counting on proteomics to take advantage of genomic databases in developing new medicines, crops, materials and solutions to challenges in energy development and environmental cleanup.