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3UP's Blade Server Used By LANL To Demonstrate mpiBLAST

3UP Systems announced that the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) demonstrated its mpiBLAST software on the company's CMS-4U blade server at this year's SC2004 conference.

BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is a family of database searching algorithms used in Bioinformatics for applications such as DNA matching. mpiBLAST (Message Passing Interface BLAST) is an open-source parallelization of NCBI BLAST (National Center for Biotechnology Information Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) and uses the Message Passing Interface to implement database segmentation, allowing it to work particularly well on cluster system architectures.

This approach achieves super-linear speed-up by segmenting the BLAST database and distributing it across cluster nodes, permitting BLAST queries to be processed on many nodes simultaneously. Because database segmentation does not create heavy communication demands and mpi-based BLAST allows for parallelization of BLAST, users can take advantage of low-cost and efficient Linux cluster architectures such as that afforded by 3UP Systems' CMS-4U blade server.

"The SC conference provides an ideal synergy between the latest in high- performance computing research, as represented by its technical program, and the latest in vendor technologies in support of HPC, as represented by its large-scale exhibition," said Wu-chun Feng of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a member of the HPCwire's 2004 Top People and Organizations To Watch List. "For SC2004, we are using 3UP Systems' CMS-4U blade server for our mpiBLAST demonstration because it offers the performance that we need for mpiBLAST in an energy-efficient compact package."

"In our own benchmark tests running 10 parallel mpiBLAST nodes in 3UP's chassis, the database distribution phase was completed in 4 minutes, versus 3 1/2 hours on one processor -- a significant achievement especially considering its price/performance," added Harry Quackenboss, president and CEO of 3UP Systems. "3UP's CMS-4U gives the HPC user community the ability to scale their performance needs while lowering their total-cost-of-ownership."

About 3UP's CMS-4U Blade Server

3UP's CMS-4U is a 4U (6 3/4 inches high) chassis that accommodates up to 12 dual-processor Xeon server blades. The system's unmatched flexibility lets users customize each chassis with the blend of compute power, storage capacity and networking capability that best suits their application.