GenaGrid

SGI ICE

Considering the international experiences, the GenaGrid consortium purchased an SGI Altix ICE grid supercomputer which is one of the most powerful machines in Hungary dedicated to scientific research. The server with 512 Intel cores and 1TB RAM is capable of 6,5TFlops, which means 6,5 trillion floating point operations a second.

The computer is extremely dense, this computing power only needs a rack with 0.8 square meters of floor space. The supercomputer uses green technologies, for example a water cooling system that is about 30-40% more efficient compared to the traditional air cooled systems and only 5% of the dissipated heat remains in the room.

The Altix ICE provides the biomedical and bioinformatics researchers with computing power that was previously unavailable in Hungary.

The computing needs in study design and data analysis are dual. There is a need for huge common memory for multiple cores working on a single problem. On the other hand there is a need for lots of parallel calculations for high-throughput analysis for example within statistical robustness testing. This dedicated grid system can handle both challenges.