One ran it in 87 hours.Ĭompaq ran it in seven." Peterson didn't disclose the name of the other vendor. We took a benchmark and gave it to all the vendors. "People asked me why we chose Compaq," says Marshall Peterson, Celera's vice president of infrastructure technology. In 1998 it inked a deal with Celera, which was looking for technology capable of handling one of the biggest computing projects of all time. Now, however, it's becoming clear that supercomputers hold the key to creating new drugs, curing diseases and eventually letting us modify our own DNA.Ĭompaq saw the promise early.
Last week, a Cray supercomputer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory decided the universe is flat and will expand forever. They monitor the nuclear stockpile, try to predict the weather and beat the pants off the world chess champion.
Until now, the super-fast machines-which can cost millions of dollars-have been used mostly for esoteric jobs with little practical value. It has also helped drive supercomputers into the mainstream of American consciousness. The high-profile race to unravel the genome has established Houston-based Compaq as a major player in supercomputing, putting it on the stage with entrenched competitors IBM And the database is growing by nearly 20 gigabytes per day, which is enough space to hold several full-length Hollywood films.Ĭompaq also provided the supercomputers that the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, England, and the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used in the Human Genome Project. To hold all the data, Celera has about 80 terabytes-that's 80 trillion bytes-of Compaq-brand storage. Celera officials say the calculation to perform the assembly involved 500 million trillion base-to-base comparisons-a job that required more than 20,000 supercomputing hours. That includes 150 four-way servers, as well as a server boasting 16 processors and 64 gigabytes of memory that assembled all the genetic information. Supercomputing facility in Rockville, Md., contains some $50 million worth of equipment from Compaq, its chief supplier.