* Cedar-Sinai uses Sun Grid Rack system for medical analysis
Sun last week announced that Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is using Sun’s Grid Rack system to process and analyze data that could lead to new treatments for life-threatening and chronic diseases.
The Sun Grid Rack system at Cedars-Sinai is comprised of 400 Sun Fire x64 Galaxy servers, Sun StorageTek storage and Sun N1 software. Attached to the Grid Rack is a storage cluster from Isilon Systems and a storage-area network/network-attached storage device from Pillar Data. (Read more about clustered storage at Cedars-Sinai here.)
The Grid Rack was installed using the services of Sun in mid-January of this year. Cedars-Sinai expects to quadruple its server capacity by using the grid.
“We have developed technology that gives us a 60GB image of all the proteins in the blood,” says Dr. David Agus, director of the Spielberg Family Center for Applied Proteomics at Cedars-Sinai. “We generate two to three terabytes of data a day,” says Agus.
The 400 Sun servers form a supercomputer that performs huge volumes of statistical and data analysis. The system is expected to generate 4TB of data daily by 2007 and 8TB daily by 2008, letting researchers analyze complex data sets in days rather than weeks or months.
Before deploying the Sun Grid Rack system, Cedars-Sinai used supercomputing resources from a variety of universities.
Agus estimates that Cedars-Sinai saved $60,000 and two months deployment time by having Sun integrate and deploy the pre-assembled grid. Moreover, the energy-efficient Sun servers provide further cost savings by using one-third of their normal power when not active. Further, the organization manages the grid with one-fifth of an administrator’s time.
