New Asia Pacific Life Sciences Initiatives Powered By Intel® Architecture
Intel Semiconductor Ltd today announced that dozens of new Life Sciences and Bio-IT initiatives across Asia-Pacific are
now being powered by Intel®-based high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and servers. As Asia’s fledgling Life
Sciences industry prepares to make significant investments over the next five years, there is also a worldwide shift
towards cost-effective, industry-standard technology platforms for the new HPC ‘supercomputers’ that are needed to
accelerate Bio-IT discoveries.
Keen to maximise tightening IT budgets, dozens of academic and scientific institutions across Asia are choosing to build
Intel®-based HPC clusters or servers, to take advantage of leading price-performance levels.
Fifteen recent deployments include University of Melbourne, HK Baptist University, HK University (Hong Kong) Institute
of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Science’s Supercomputing Education Research Center,
Indian Institute of Technology and Center for Scientific and Industrial Research (India) Tsinghua University (People’s
Republic of China) Bioinformatics Institute, Genome Institute of Singapore, Nanyang Polytechnic, School of
BioInformatics, National University of Singapore Supercomputing and Visualisation Unit, and Singapore MIT Alliance
(Singapore) and Kaohsiung City Government’s Bio-Informatics Grid (Taiwan).
IDC estimates that around US$50 billion will be injected into the region’s Life Sciences markets from both public and
private sources, and expects bio-IT revenue to reach US$2.6 billion in Asia/Pacific* by 2006, at a compound annual
growth rate of 46%. Intel/Page 2
“We are seeing two significant trends in Asia today. First, Life Sciences organisations are spending up to 50% of
capital expenditure on the required ‘technology stack’ to support their programs, as they constantly demand more
computing power to accelerate their discoveries.
Second, we are seeing growing interest in cost-effective, industry-standard HPC platforms, as the fledgling industry
attempts to maximise the return on their ‘capex’ investments,” commented IDC’s director of life sciences for the Asia
Pacific region.
“The increasing demand for HPC power in the Life Sciences industry will be a major driver of computing innovation
throughout the next decade. We expect Intel-based clusters and grids, using open standard building-blocks based on
Intel® Itanium® 2, Intel® Xeon™ and Intel® Pentium® 4 processors, to deliver the performance and affordability required
by the industry,” said Jason Fedder, regional director of Intel Asia-Pacific’s solutions group, keynoting at today’s
BioITWorld Hong Kong 2003 conference.
Intel-based Platforms Powering Asian Life Sciences Programs [Fuller Details in Appendix] At least fifteen leading Asian
organisations have recently selected Intel-based HPC clusters or servers, and are using them, or are planning to use
them, to help power Life Sciences programs. These organisations are involved in a variety of initiatives, ranging from
gene sequencing, protein folding and functional genomics, to Chinese medicine projects.
An Asian Bio-IT Ecosystem Emerging The projects are typically headed by world-class academic teams, often with
connections to overseas institutions, and supported by an emerging breed of specialist Asian HPC solution-providers.
These include the Singapore Computer Systems’ Linux Competency Centre and India’s CDC Linux, which specialises in
building HPC solutions for Life Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and other applications.
Growing Popularity of Clusters Clusters are part of a worldwide trend, which has seen a dramatic increase in the number
of Intel-based systems being used for HPC deployments. A cluster is a collection of connected, independent computers
that work in unison to solve a problem. The latest worldwide TOP500 Supercomputers List***, previously made up almost
exclusively of proprietary, RISC-based supercomputers, now includes 56 Intel-based systems, versus just two systems only
three years ago.
Intel Itanium Processor Family & Grid Computing: the Next HPC Wave Amongst the fifteen Asian organisations, at least five of them have chosen systems
based on the new Itanium architecture. The 64-bit Itanium processor family addresses the requirements of scientific
researchers, including superior floating-point performance, memory performance, and support for large data sets. Several
leading global research institutions have begun to deploy Itanium-based systems, including The National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Cornell Theory Center and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
The NCSA deploys a large-scale computational center powered by Itanium 2-based systems, and soon expects to complete
deployment of 10 teraflops (a trillion calculations per second) of clusters.
About Intel Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and
communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.
Intel, Itanium, Xeon and Pentium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the
United States and other countries. * International Data Corporation (IDC), Nov. 2002. ** Other names and brands may be
claimed as the property of others. ** TOP500 Supercomputers List, http://www.top500.org.