"IBM's $7.6 million donation is a significant investment in life sciences research in Texas and will help promote Houston as a premier research collaboration center," said Tony Befi, vice president, POWER Systems and IBM senior state executive for Texas. "The POWER7 is ideal for the type of research performed at Rice and the Texas Medical Center and will help make it possible to detect and analyze patterns that may one day lead to important medical breakthroughs and smarter healthcare."

"We're proud to be working with Rice on a research project that not only supports IBM's worldwide university initiatives but is so important to the advancement of medical science," said Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and vice president of innovation and global university programs. "It's exciting that we have technology available today that can help biomedical researchers tackle some of the most challenging and complex diseases we face."

The BlueBioU supercomputer is housed at Rice's $16 million state-of-the-art data center, which supports the new green-enabled technologies available on the POWER7 platform. The energy-efficient features of the POWER7-based supercomputer include the ability to create policies and protocols that optimize the balance between energy usage and performance.

The data center is connected to the Rice campus and to Texas Medical Center partners via a new $22 million network with a multi-gigabit backbone and more than a terabit of aggregate bandwidth. In addition, Rice has a new high-availability storage infrastructure that provides multiple terabytes of data storage in the data center.

Rice's BlueBioU team includes Khan, Sarkar, John Mellor-Crummey, professor of computer science and of electrical and computer engineering; Kim Andrews, manager of academic and research computing; and Chandler Wilkerson, lead system architect.

SOURCE IBM