Papaya Genome Sequencing Project and SGI

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The International Papaya Genome Consortium, led by researchers at the University of Hawaii have announced the completion of the Papaya Genome Sequencing Project. The two year effort utilized SGI Altix and InfiniteStorage products to sequence 372 million base pairs. This makes the disease-resistant “SunUp” papaya to be the first fruit and the first transgenic crop to be sequenced.

SGI logoSequencing the papaya genome is the first large scale genome project done in Hawaii with international collaboration from 22 research institutes and will benefit the papaya research community, papaya farmers, and consumers for years to come,” said Maqsudul Alam, Director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Genomics, Proteomics, and Bioinformatics, College of Natural Sciences, lead institute of the International Papaya Genome Consortium. “We chose the SGI Altix because of the configuration of the memory system, how quickly we can use the random memory, and also the scalability of the system, and of course, the price/performance. SGI technology has been instrumental in achieving this technological and scientific milestone.”

The project, housed at the UH Maui High Performance Computing Center [MHPCC] at the University of Hawaii utilized a 32 processor SGI Altix compute platform with a set of custom-developed web interfaces to power the simulations.

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