12 December 2006
Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Derek Hanekom, together with Craig
Barrett, Chairman of Intel Co-operation, "switched on" a state-of-the art
supercomputer at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in
Pretoria yesterday.
"The donation of this super computer will go a long way to complement the
efforts by our government to provide a world-class research infrastructure to
researchers," Hanekom said.
One of the major aims of this super computer is to fast-track the process of
finding a cure for some of the country's most serious illnesses, such as HIV
and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, through advanced bioinformatics.
"The rising spread of communicable diseases threatens South Africa's
livelihood and economy.". Barrett said, "This high-performance computing system
will push the limits of scientific discovery to accelerate the creation of
treatments and cures."
This super computer created by Intel and HP, provides world-class resource
for the country's bio and medical informatics community, advancing its genome
and statistical analysis research. The supercomputer will initially research
HIV vaccine definitions, process image analysis of health related data and
perform protein structure analysis.
It also provides a scalable solution that can help accelerate finding a cure
for harsh diseases by handling complex data-intensive processing for
experiments measuring tens of thousands of data points in hundreds of thousands
of samples.
Intel will also assist the bio and medical informatics research community to
port and optimise its applications for the leading edge computer using Intel
software, libraries and performance tools.
Enquiries:
Nthabi Maoela
Office of the Deputy Minister, Media Liaison Officer
Cell: 082 944 0015
Delai Griggs
Intel Co-operation, Country Marketing Manager
Cell: 082 348 7802
Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
12 December 2006
Source: SAPA
