[Colloquium] Wu-chun Feng talk - Fri. 10/17 at TTI-C

[Meridel Trimble]

TOYOTA TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE TALK

Speaker: Wu-chun Feng                                                 
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Speaker’s homepage: http://public.lanl.gov/feng/

Date: Friday, October 17th, 2003
Time: 11:45am
Place: TTI-C’s Conference Room (The Press Building - 1427 E. 60th St.) 
FREE LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED

Title: Green Destiny + mpiBLAST = Bioinformagic

Abstract: Green Destiny, featured last year in The New York Times and CNN and a 
recent winner of a 2003 R&D 100 Award, revolutionized the high-performance 
computing community by re-defining "performance" to focus on issues of 
efficiency, reliability, and availability.  Green Destiny is a 240-processor 
supercomputer that fits in six square feet and sips as little as 3.2 kilowatts 
of power; it does not require any special infrastructure to operate, i.e., no 
cooling, no raised floor, no air filtration, etc. Consequently, several 
pharmaceutical and bioinformatics institutions, who likewise do not have 
special infrastructure to house supercomputing clusters, demonstrated 
significant interest in Green Destiny type of solutions.  
  
The above interactions led to the birth of mpiBLAST, an open-source 
parallelization of BLAST that achieves super-linear speed-up via a technique 
called database segmentation. Database segmentation allows each computing node 
to search a smaller portion of the database, thus eliminating disk I/O and 
vastly improving performance. When used in concert with Green Destiny, we 
demonstrate that a 300-kB BLAST query that takes nearly one full day to 
complete on a traditional workstation takes only minutes on Green Destiny.

Please contact Meridel Trimble for further information
(mtrimble at tti-c.org/773.834.9873)