Fofanov and Johnsson Win Unique Itanium-based solutions advance in Environmental Protection Research
SAN RAMON, Calif., May 19, 2008 – The Itanium® Solutions Alliance today announced the winners of its second annual Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Award. The global award program recognizes innovation and achievement using Intel® Itanium® processor technology to solve complex humanitarian, business and entrepreneurial challenges. Each winner receives a $50,000 U.S. cash prize or can make a charitable donation to an organization of their choice. This year’s category winners are University of Houston bioinformatics research team for Humanitarian Impact; Protégésoft for Enterprise Business Application achievement; and S7 Software for Entrepreneurial Innovation.
“The Itanium Solutions Alliance congratulates our three winners. Their stories clearly demonstrate the impact of Intel Itanium technology on solving mission-critical computing challenges in a wide range of application environments. The breadth of entries was impressive and selecting a single winner in each category was extremely challenging. The winners’ and finalists’ solutions clearly showcase the value of an Itanium®-based solution over costlier mainframes in real-life applications,” said Joan Jacobs, executive director, Itanium Solutions Alliance.
Humanitarian Impact winner University of Houston researchers Drs. Yuriy Fofanov and Lennart Johnsson and team developed an application using high-performance computing and the latest advances in genomic sequencing to identify and monitor microbial genetic diversity. Itanium-based systems power the computational tools the team needs to advance their research into global warming, human activities and toxic waste in efforts to protect humanity, other organisms and combat greenhouse gases that are harmful to the environment. The university powered their solution using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP rx5670 and rx8620 and SGI Altix 3700 servers.
“The high performance computing power of Intel Itanium processors makes it possible for scientists to better navigate the microbial landscape, which is essential in our research as we analyze critical genetic information,” said Dr. Fofanov, director, Bioinformatics Laboratory, University of Houston. “Itanium-based systems provide the memory bandwidth we need to store special data structures required to manipulate genomic information In addition, Itanium’s high availability launches us toward initiating new research projects that will advance human progress in environmental protection, public health and safety, sustainable energy and many other research areas.”
Eleven industry experts made up the judging panel for this year’s Innovation Award program. Judges reviewed Award applications based on level of difficulty, results produced and originality. Entrants applied to one of the three categories and were asked to demonstrate one of the following criteria:
•Humanitarian Impact applications needed to show an impact on humanity through research, social improvements or other humanitarian efforts;
•Enterprise Business Application entries were asked to prove either hard business results, such as cost savings and ROI or soft business impact, including customer satisfaction and new product development; or
•Entrepreneurial Innovation category, open to privately held entities with annual revenues less than $25 million in the previous fiscal year, sought to recognize enhanced business results through deployment of Itanium-based systems achievements in areas such as IT consolidation, increased ROI, increased customer satisfaction and new product development.
For more information about the Innovation Award or the winning organizations, visit www.itaniumsolutionsalliance.org/programs/innovationaward2008/.
About the Itanium Solutions Alliance
The Itanium Solutions Alliance was formed by leading enterprise and technical solutions providers to work together toward a common objective of transitioning the world of proprietary computing platforms to open, industry standard solutions based on Intel Itanium architecture. Together with leading enterprise software and hardware providers, the Alliance is dedicated to accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of Itanium-based solutions. For information about Itanium-based solutions that bolster mission-critical computing, please visit www.itaniumsolutions.com. More information about the Itanium Solutions Alliance, membership, industry resources and developer programs can be found at www.itaniumsolutionsalliance.org.
About the University of Houston’s Bioinformatics Laboratory, TLC2 and ACRL
Researchers at the University of Houston are committed to studying and analyzing microbial communities, which play a key role in environmental changes, human activities and the environment. (www.bioinfo.uh.edu) The Texas Learning and Computation Center (TLC2) fosters and supports interdisciplinary research, education and training in computational sciences and engineering. TLC2 has state-of-the-art computation, visualization and educational facilities for environmental studies, biological, biomedical and energy research, undergraduate and graduate education and teacher training. ( http://www.tlc2.uh.edu.) The Advanced Computing Research Laboratory (ACRL) carries out research on innovative ways to harness computational resources for scientific and engineering applications and participates in several national and international research efforts in high-performance computing, storage and networking. (www.cs.uh.edu/~johnsson)
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