Web portals, grid computing lead the way

Web portal use by the research community and the popularity of grid computing are two leading trends in today's bioIT market, according to Sun Microsystems computational biology supremo Stefan Unger.

Web sites have become endemic as a way for research groups and institutes to give their achievements wide currency, says Unger, business development manager for computational biology in Sun's global education and research division.

It is a trend that has contributed to a change of attitude toward IT suppliers by their customers in the biological sciences, he says.

A few years ago, the research establishment "just pointed grad students at a bunch of hardware ...and there was sort of an easy-going attitude (toward dealing with problems that might arise with the computing platform)."

These days, when most research institutes use web sites to make public their newest DNA sequences and other results on a global basis, "they can't afford to have their servers crashing," says Unger.

The result is much more pressure on equipment suppliers to provide highly-reliable systems that require minimal maintenance.

Unger's comments came during an interview at the recent International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology which drew nearly 1000 computational biologists to Brisbane on June 29 to July 3.

He also flagged the sharp rise of grid computing - a technology which networks together many processors scattered in different locations to attack a particular problem.

It is specifically known as biogrid in the biological community but the same technology is being applied across all the scientific disciplines.

"It is taking off because people who can't afford the processing power to handle some of their bigger problems realise that they can get access to that type of power if they join with other processors in their own universities or other universities," says Unger.

Sun is aiding the trend with software it calls Grid Engine that acts as middleware linking different processors in the grid. In the past two to three years, some 7000 Grid Engine packages have been deployed and new ones shipping at the rate of about 100 a week, according to Sun's director of technology in global education and research, Marc Hamilton.

Grid Engine is one component of a larger Sun initiative called N1 which is an attempt to reduce the headaches associated with managing large computer sites.

N1 pools the server, storage and networking components of a site which are normally treated as individual aspects and manages them as one entity.

"We found the average server in the industry has a 25 per cent utilisation rate whereas in a top IT shop it is more like 80 per cent," says Hamilton.

"We have captured the knowledge in the best-run shops and incorporated it in N1 where it enables everyone to get that 80 per cent utilisation by changing the way they provision and manage their servers."

Versions of N1 for some Sun systems are already in production but the data centre edition is still in early customer tests and is not due for general release for another few months.