Georgia Tech announced today that the NSF, using money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, has funded a four year, $1M effort to develop new petascale tools for genomic sequencing
Even on today’s fastest parallel computers, it could take centuries to analyze genome rearrangements for large, complex organisms. That is why the research team — which also includes Jijun Tang, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina; and Stephen Schaeffer, an associate professor of biology at Penn State — is focusing on future generations of petascale machines, which will be able to process more than a thousand trillion, or 10^15, calculations per second. Today, most personal computers can only process a few hundred thousand calculations per second.
The researchers plan to develop new algorithms in an open-source software framework that will utilize the capabilities of parallel, petascale computing platforms to infer ancestral rearrangement events. The starting point for developing these new algorithms will be GRAPPA, an open-source code co-developed by Bader and initially released in 2000 that reconstructed the evolutionary relatedness among species.
Chris Heier: Tim Davies, our co-founder, and myself founded Tycrid in September of 2007. Our backgrounds over the past seven years of working together have been in synthetic aperture imaging and real-time seismic image processing. Working in technical disciplines like these, you find really quickly that there are major limitations in normal computing architectures. Not enough processing power, bandwidth, etc. We had developed some pretty innovative solutions around FPGAs, but these came with the issues of time and expertise required to utilize them.
Jeff Brown, NVIDIA’s GM for Professional Solutions, explains why OptiX is invaluable: “This opens the door to a new level of interactive realism. Ray tracing’s inherent parallelism makes it a perfect fit for GPU computing. The OptiX engine makes it easy for developers to exploit that power to create an exciting new class of applications. It enables critical design tasks — such as examining reflections, refractions and shadow – to be performed now in real-time.”
Steven Pieper and Robert Wiringa, senior scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, have won the 2010 Tom W. Bonner Prize in nuclear physics. The award will be presented by the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C., in February 2010.
Acceleware announced today a new version of AxRTM for Reverse Time Migration. This release allows seismic data users of any use to process RTM on existing x86 clustered platforms or within heterogeneous computing environments using GPUs. They have also added Tilted Transverse Isotropy [TTI] support in this release of AxRTM. TTI provides enhanced accuracy for imaging required to make better informed drilling decisions within areas of complex folded geology.
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Professor Stephen Hawking, principal investigator of the COSMOS consortium, welcomed the news and said, “This is an exciting time in astronomy, particle physics and cosmology with the UK heavily involved in world-leading terrestrial and space-based experiments. These STFC supercomputer funds will ensure that calculations from our theories keep pace and are tested against the observations now flooding in. I am confident these resources will help UK scientists answer some of the biggest questions about our Universe.”
For our 20th anniversary event, we chose to return to Detroit… the locale of so many successful CAE events with anchored by several key CAE automotive customers. It’s been quite a climb for these customers during these many months of a difficult economy, but after meeting with customers at the event, I was convinced that Detroit has the perseverance and drive to recover and return to a leading center of innovative product design and development. The discussions that I had with key customers confirmed their belief in CAE simulations and recent HP CAE investments by these customers prove that they realize the criticality of CAE to ensure their growth and success for the US automotive industry. One customer told me that even though times are difficult, cuts in CAE simulations would be ill advised because lack of investment today would result in lack of competitive product offering when the economy fully recovers.
