These Servers Get Your Blood Flowing

Midwest System Builder's Linux Cluster Clocks IBM To Win University Deal

By Joseph F. Kovar, ChannelWeb
11:00 AM EST Wed. Nov. 22, 2006
From the November 22, 2006 issue of CRN
Page 1 of 2

Pig tissue or carbon? That's the question faced by researchers, doctors and patients when looking at replacing the valves in a diseased heart.

And researchers are now searching for the answer to that question with the help of a custom cluster of Advanced Micro Devices Opteron servers running Linux and tied together with proprietary high-speed networking gear, all of which was put together by Reason, a high-end system builder based in Burnsville, Minn.

That cluster resulted from a request for quote from the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, a research arm of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, which wants to understand how the force generated by blood flow impacts the life of individual blood cells. It's a big question for such little cells, said Dr. Liang Ge, research associate at the laboratory, and important for learning how to build better heart-valve replacements.

While valves made from pig tissue need replacing about every 10 years, mechanical valves create more force and can damage blood cells. "We want to know, if you use a mechanical valve, what kind of force is applied to the blood cells? What is the effect from different valve designs? And how can we improve the design?" Ge said.

The scientists needed a system that could deliver a very high-resolution image, high enough to see how blood flow was affecting cells only 8 microns in diameter. Eight companies responded to the lab's RFQ, including such vendors as IBM and Dell.

In the end Reason won the bid thanks to its solution and its local presence, said Tom Morton, Reason's director of market development. "We were a little less costly than IBM, but the customer knew we were local and could come if needed at the drop of a hat," he said.

Reason certainly had the experience. In addition to building desktop PCs and servers, the 20-year-old company has been building PC clusters using a variety of open source software for the past five years.

It also helped that Reason had worked with the laboratory on custom storage and with the university on a Geowall project, building a workstation capable of displaying 3-D satellite images of the Earth's surface on a wall of 15 flat-panel displays. "We got wind of the project before it went to bid because we were already University of Minnesota contractors," Morton said.

For the blood-flow project, Reason developed a cluster of 54 compute nodes, each with two dual-core Opteron 275 processors running at 2.2GHz, giving the cluster a total of 216 processor cores. There is also a super node with two dual-core Opteron processors.

The Opteron was specified in the RFQ because at the time it had a significantly lower energy requirement compared to Intel processors, said Dominic Daninger, vice president of engineering at Reason. While that advantage has lately been less pronounced, the Opterons still have a significant advantage in terms of their on-chip memory controllers, Daninger said. "Opterons in such RFQs are favored over Intel 10 to one," he said.

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