The key to Long's idea centered on four pieces of hardware found inside each Cray computer. Distinct from the computer's central processing unit, these pieces, when acting in concert, are extraordinarily efficient at pattern matching. This hardware and its associated instruction set were first developed for the intelligence community. Most other users of these computers neither know nor care that this hardware exists, says Steve Conway, Cray's corporate communications vice president and head of bioinformatics.
The ABCC already owned millions of dollars worth of high-powered computing equipment, including systems developed by IBM, Compaq, Sun, and Silicon Graphics Inc. These computers aid scientists working on phenomenally complex computational problems, but each has its strengths and weaknesses. None had high-speed, pattern-matching capabilities--except for one.
The initial results from this collaboration were announced July 9 and suggested that Cray computers could provide the horsepower necessary for comprehensive analyses of sequence landmarks. The collaborators ...
