Unix Computer Cluster

西南生物医学研究基金会（SFBR）遗传学系的主要研究旨在寻找导致常见疾病（心脏病、糖尿病、肥胖、骨质疏松等）易感性的基因及其风险因素。与这些领域的许多传统工作不同，这些工作分析了兄弟姐妹和核心家庭的疾病模式，我们开创了使用可能包括数十个亲属的大家庭（谱系）。这种方法大大增加了可用于分析的遗传传播信息量。为了进行这种方法所导致的高度计算密集型分析，我们还率先在统计遗传学中开发和应用并行处理。1995年，我们组装了一个Unix处理器集群，用于运行专门为我们部门编写的生产分析。这一做法的成功导致对这一集群定期进行一系列升级，并最终于2000年建造了第二个集群。随着我们项目数量的增加和处理需求的增长，我们面临着在原始集群越来越过时的时候需要额外的计算能力。因此，我们正在申请资金购买一个新的100节点双处理器Unix集群，以增强我们目前的能力。

The major research of the Department of Genetics at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical research (SFBR) is aimed at finding genes that contribute to susceptibility to common diseases (heart disease, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, etc.) and their risk factors. Unlike much of the traditional work in these areas which analyzes disease patterns in sibships and nuclear families, we have pioneered the use of extended families (pedigrees) that may include many dozens of relatives. This approach greatly increases the amount of information about genetic transmission available for analysis. To carry out the highly compute- intensive analyses that are the consequence of this approach, we also pioneered in the development and application of parallel processing in statistical genetics. In 1995 we assembled a cluster of Unix processors to run production analyses written specifically for the purpose in our Department. The success of this approach led to a regular series of upgrades to this cluster, and ultimately to construction of a second cluster in 2000. As the number of our projects has increased and processing demand grows, we are faced with a need for additional computing power at a time when our original cluster is increasingly obsolete. Thus, we are requesting funds to purchase a new 100-node dual processor Unix cluster to augment our current capabilities.