Unix Computer Cluster

西南生物医学研究基金会(SFBR)遗传学部的主要研究旨在寻找导致常见疾病(心脏病、糖尿病、肥胖症、骨质疏松症等)易感性的基因。以及他们的风险因素。与这些领域的许多传统工作不同，我们分析兄弟姐妹和核心家庭的疾病模式，我们率先使用了可能包括数十个亲属的大家庭(家谱)。这种方法极大地增加了可用于分析的关于基因传播的信息量。为了进行这种方法带来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了并行处理。1995年，我们组装了一组Unix处理器，以运行我们部专门为此目的编写的生产分析。这种方法的成功导致对这一组群进行了一系列定期升级，并最终在2000年建造了第二个组群组。随着我们项目数量的增加和处理需求的增长，在我们原来的集群越来越过时的时候，我们面临着对额外计算能力的需求。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.