When light-rail service launches in metropolitan Phoenix next month, researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in downtown Phoenix and their colleagues at Arizona State University in Tempe will certainly enjoy speedier back-and-forth travel. But the real acceleration will happen when two recently announced computing advances at ASU are both up and running.

The first major enhancement is already in place: the Saguaro 2, a new supercomputer, housed in ASU's engineering college, that can perform 50 trillion mathematical operations per second. That doubles the capabilities of ASU's High Performance Computing Initiative (HPCI) and, according to James Lowey, director of TGen's High Performance Biocomputing Center, it will increase 20-fold the computing power previously available to researchers at TGen. TGen will use Saguaro 2 for DNA sequencing, genotyping, microarrays, and bioinformatics projects, as well as complex new simulations.

"This is really a remarkable testament," to the cooperative efforts of ASU and TGen, especially in a tight funding environment, said Jeffrey Trent, TGen's president and scientific director. The purchase of Saguaro 2 was possible because of a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health in July to TGen, ASU's Ira Fulton School of Engineering and the Biodesign Institute at ASU.

ASU now owns the 64th most powerful supercomputer in the world (up from No. 283), and Saguaro 2 is one of the 10 fastest supercomputers at academic institutions.

That elite position "is crucial to the competitiveness of our research at TGen and at ASU," said HPCI director Dan Stanzione. "It's increasingly crucial to our economic competitiveness as a state, and nation as well."

Dr. Stanzione said that the enormous data sets TGen is now manipulating make a supercomputer like Saguaro 2 essential. "In 2009, more genome-sequence data will be generated than all the words spoken by humans in all of history," he said. "Teasing meaningful understanding from this avalanche of data is also the role of HPC (high-performance computing)."

The huge data sets call not only for faster supercomputers, but also for a new way to transmit information from one site to another. Researchers may be able to step onto a light-rail train just down the street from TGen and step off in Tempe at ASU, but their data is less mobile. Currently, transmitting a 7-terabyte data set over a standard Internet connection can take as long as 12 days.

In response, TGen and ASU announced last week the outlines of an arrangement between ASU and Obsidian Strategics Inc., a Canadian defense firm, to establish a new kind of fiber-optic data link between the two institutions. The technology Obsidian intends to use, relying on so-called "dark fiber," unused, already-laid fiber-optic cables, would cut transfer times to as little as one hour for that 7-terabyte data set.

"With the ever-increasing amount of data being generated by both proteomics and next-generation sequencing, it is critical to have state-of-the-art communications networks between locations where data is generated and where it is analyzed," Lowey said. "Having this very high-speed link helps position TGen as being a leader in biomedical data analysis."

Obsidian achieves such high speeds by dramatically extending the reach InfiniBand, an input-output linking technology used in HPC as an alternative to Ethernet. Typically, InfiniBand provides range extension, routing, and encryption over relatively short distances, for such purposes as linking to storage devices or connecting clustered processors. Obsidian's Longbow Technology enables the same high-bandwidth functionality over much longer distances--potentially thousands of miles rather than a few feet.

"The basic Internet is like driving on a busy highway," said David Southwell, president of Obsidian, in the State Press. "There are lots of people trying to do lots of different things. To move data, we essentially need train tracks all moving in the same direction and going to the same place."

The link between TGen and ASU will serve as a pilot project for a larger implementation of Longbow. Working with the Canadian consulate in Phoenix, Obsidian and ASU have agreed on a plan to use Longbow to link higher-education facilities throughout Arizona and in neighboring states.

"The ASU-Obsidian partnership can showcase new ways to leverage regional optical networks," Southwell said, "promoting more-efficient utilization of large-scale computers and storage, reducing overall energy consumption, and massively improving remote access--in a way that facilitates statewide collaboration."

Obsidian originally developed Longbow for data-intensive defense applications, but Southwell said that the future market for the technology is primarily in the biotechnology sector, and that Arizona should serve as an ideal testing ground.

"Arizona has a very strong biotech market," he said in the State Press. "Biotech companies are the largest users of supercomputers, and they continue to grow. Because of the market and topography of Arizona, it is the ideal place for our company to showcase the potential of our technology. Ultimately," he added, "we are looking to locate our own facility in Phoenix."

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For more information:

"ASU supercomputer aids bioscientists in powerful research," Arizona Republic, 11/2/2008

"Canadian company looks to speed link between ASU supercomputer, TGen," State Press, 11/18/2008

ASU news release, 11/12/2008

TGen news release, 11/12/2008