HH Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, UAE Minister of Education and Chairman of the Higher Colleges of Technology and HE Mohammed Al Gergawi, CEO of Dubai Holding, yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to work together to provide the Business Partners of Dubai Biotechnology and Research Park (DuBiotech), Dubai’s Free Zone dedicated to the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors, with the capability to conduct research using IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer.
Mr Gergawi signed the MoU on behalf of DuBiotech and Sheikh Nahyan signed on behalf of the Centre of Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT), the leading technology and research organisation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).Under the terms of DuBiotech’s agreement with CERT, DuBiotech will tap into 5.7 Teraflops of supercomputing power (equivalent to 5.7 trillion mathematical operations per second) provided by the Blue Gene system at CERT. This mammoth capacity will be made available to Business Partners at DuBiotech to conduct life science research. The agreement, announced at the IBM stand at Gitex 2005, means that Business Partners engaged in biotechnology research and development at DuBiotech will have the opportunity to make use of CERT’s supercomputing centre.
“This immensely powerful supercomputer is normally used in astronomy, academic and life science research involving proteomics and protein interactions requiring significant computing power. This represents a unique opportunity for DuBiotech and CERT to boost biotechnology research for the Middle East,” says Dr Abdulqader Al Khayat, Executive Director of DuBiotech. “This further benefits the leaders in biotechnology who are looking to develop new advances that counter medical issues prevalent in the Gulf, such as Thalassemia, Diabetes, Anaemia and Cancer.”
As well as benefiting the biotechnology sector, the announcement heralds the arrival in the region of the first such supercomputer of its kind, as this technology has been previously deployed only in Europe, the US and Asia.
“CERT intends to offer supercomputing services on demand to research institutions, colleges, universities, government and private sector companies with large data processing requirements. With the explosion of information there is a corresponding imperative to process at the Teraflop performance level offered by the Blue Gene. CERT will provide access to the only Blue Gene computer in the entire South Asia, Middle East, North Africa region.” says Dr. Robert Richards, Chief Executive Officer of CERT.
In computers, FLOPS are FLoating-point Operations per Second. A Floating-point is, according to IBM, "a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers." Using floating-point encoding, extremely long numbers can be handled relatively easily. A teraflop is equivalent to a trillion computing calculations per second.
For more information
Jonathan Howell-Jones
Corporate Communications Department
Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone
Tel: +971 4 391 3855
Fax: +971 4 367 2790
Email: jonathan.howell-jones@tecom.ae
Source : www.dubiotech.com
