SGI announced today that the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute for Advanced Computational Research (MSI) will soon deploy a new HPC system based around the Altix UV 1000.  The new system will be made possible by a grant by the National Institutes of Health [NIH] awarded to the University of Minnesota in June of this year.

From the release:

MSI named the system Koronis after a Minnesota lake; it will feature a 1,152-core SGI Altix UV 1000 system with a shared-memory architecture in which each core can access all 3.1 terabytes of memory directly. Koronis will also include high-performance visualization workstations to handle large-size biomedical data and high-performance and -fidelity data storage to ensure adequate data analysis and processing.

Given the source of funding, its clear that the main workloads will be life sciences-centric.  The release quotes separating the main workloads into four areas: multi-scale modeling, chemical dynamics, bioinformatics and computational biology, and biomedical imaging.

For more info on the new silicon headed for Minnesota, read their full release here.