Ethanol Producer Magazine, ND
04-03-06
Supercomputer sequencing corn genome
Iowa State University (ISU) was the recipient of the world’s 73rd most powerful
supercomputer this January, according to a Jan. 30 ISU news release. The
refrigerator-sized IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, now stationed in ISU’s
Durham Center, will be used to help the university sequence the corn genome,
the most complex genome-sequencing project to date.
It is extremely difficult to assemble the 30 million to 60 million tiny segments of
the genetic material that needs sequencing—a task the supercomputing research
team in part is charged with fulfilling. The new IBM supercomputer can perform
an amazing 5.7 trillion calculations per second. It has 2,048 processors and
comes with 11 trillion bytes of data storage. With the delivery of its new
supercomputer, ISU now ranks on an academic short list of U.S. universities
possessing the 10 most powerful supercomputers on college campuses across
the nation.
Four institutions in total are working on the project, the timeline for which is three
years and carrying a $29.5 million price tag. Along with ISU, principle researcher
Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.), the University of Arizona and Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., are also involved. The ISU
research team is being led by Arinivas Aluru, an ISU professor of electrical
and computer engineering. Aluru’s team members include ISU professors
Robert Jernigan, Patrick Schnable and Arun Somani.
The research team was awarded $600,000 on behalf of The National Science
Foundation to help purchase the supercomputer, a sum representing just less
than half of the supercomputer’s total cost of $1.25 million. The remaining cost
was covered by ISU; specifically, funds were provided through allocations from
ISU’s President’s Office, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Information
Technology Services and the Plant Sciences Institute.
In related news, two ISU researchers are serving on the editorial board that’s
launching a new scientific quarterly publication called The Plant Genome, a peerreviewed scientific journal put out by Crop Science Society of America, according
to a Feb. 15 ISU release. The two ISU researchers on the editorial board of the
new quarterly are Randy Shoemaker, an ISU professor of agronomy and a
research geneticist for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service; and
Kendall Lamkey, interim chair of the ISU Department of Agronomy and
director of the Raymond F. Baker Center for Plant Breeding at ISU. Lamkey
is also editor of Crop Science, the flagship publication of the Crop Science
Society of America.