Queensland splurges on supercomputer

A $4 million supercomputer is the Queensland government's latest addition to its already impressive investment in the state's biotech infrastructure assets.

The SGI Origin 3000 supercomputer has been installed at the Queensland Parallel Supercomputing Foundation, run by a consortium of six Queensland universities.

A second stage planned later this year will treble the system's computing power and push it into the ranks of the world's top 150 supercomputing facilities, according to the government.

The high-performance, general purpose system is particularly suited to researchers in the life sciences and chemical sciences.

It is combined with immersive visualisation facilities which allow researchers to navigate interactively through 3D images projected on a curved screen.

According to SGI officials, the result is the country's leading high-performance graphics environment at the present time and should hold special appeal for drug designers and molecular models.

Among those queuing up to use the system are bioinformatics, developmental biology and functional genomics researchers from Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience.

The genomic research centre at Griffith University is also taking advantage of the new facilities to sort through thousands of blood samples and gene markers to zero in on the genetic bases of diseases such as cancer.

The Queensland government has committed $10 million over three years to develop world-class supercomputing facilities in Queensland. To date, it has spent $8 million on processing, large-scale data management and visualisation facilities.

At the official unveiling of the new system, Queensland Minister for Innovation and Information Economy, Paul Lucas, observed that high-performance computing and visualisation technologies are driving leading-edge R&D in many industry sectors.

Those included the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors, he said. "For example, a chemist designing a new drug can use the supercomputer to investigate the molecular structure of pharmaceutical compounds, and use the visualisation facilities to observe the docking of these drug molecules with cell receptor sites."

The investment in supercomputing and visualisation facilities is designed to keep the state's researchers nationally and internationally competitive, Lucas said.