Linux cluster [at University of Buffalo] will help research treatment of cancer, AIDS
Linux cluster [at University of Buffalo] will help research treatment of cancer, AIDS
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The cluster at the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics at SUNY Buffalo went online in mid-August and is often running at full capacity even though the set-up team is still doing some minor tweaking, says Jeffrey Skolnick, the soon-to-be director of the bioinformatics center.
Most of the computers in the cluster are 1.26 GHz Dell PowerEdge servers, with a few higher-speed Xeons thrown in. Subcontractor Sistina Software is providing cluster file system technology to manage the data traffic among the nodes.
Skolnick can rattle off all kinds of interesting statistics about the cluster. It will enable researchers to predict protein structure and run large-scale computer simulations, and work that would’ve taken 1,000 years on on processor will be done in three to six months on the cluster. “We’re not just trying to collect computers, which is a nice little hobby,” he says. “It enables us to do science we couldn’t do elsewhere.”
And managing these 2,000 machines will be two sysadmins. That’s right, two of them. That’s the beauty of running a cluster instead of a bunch of individual machines, of course, and Linux will help keep the maintenance costs down, Skolnick says. “I’ve got to get the most bang for my research dollar,” he adds.
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