Compaq Computer Corp. and Singapore"s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) agreed on Tuesday to invest $6.8 million to develop the largest life sciences supercomputing facility in the region.
The costs, shared equally by both parties, will go mainly toward hardware and software for the newly launched Bioinformatics Research Centre (BIRC) at NTU.
"We are designing the largest life science supercomputing system in the Asia Pacific region, outside of Japan, that"s capable of achieving half a trillion operations per second for BIRC," Tan Choon Seng, Compaq"s ASEAN managing director, told a news conference.
The infrastructure will be implemented in phases and the computer is expected to be ranked among the 80 most powerful computing systems in the world when fully installed in early 2003. U.S. computer maker Compaq is a big supplier of servers to the life science sector and has a partnership with U.S. firm Celera Genomics (news - web sites) to write software and build a supercomputer to unravel the human genome (news - web sites) sequence.