Biotech Free Zone and CERT to boost research with first IBM supercomputer in the Middle East

Dubai Biotechnology and Research Park (DuBiotech), Dubai's Free Zone dedicated to the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors, and the Centre of Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT), the leading technology and research organisation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have today agreed to work together to provide DuBiotech's Business Partners with the capability to conduct research using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer.  

Under the terms of DuBiotech's agreement with CERT, DuBiotech will tap into 5.7 Teraflops of supercomputing power provided by CERT. This mammoth capacity will be made available to Business Partners at the biotechnology Free Zone to conduct research related to life sciences and bio-science generally.

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 for techniques such as life sciences, astronomy and academic research. This represents a unique opportunity for DuBiotech and CERT to boost biotechnology research for the Middle East, says Dr Abdulqadr 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 boosting biotechnology, 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 and the US .

?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.