Iowa State University (ISU) was the recipient of the world's 73rd most powerful supercomputer this January, according to a Jan. 30 ISU news release. The refrigerator-sized IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, now stationed in ISU's Durham Center, will be used to help the university sequence the corn genome, the most complex genome-sequencing project to date.

It is extremely difficult to assemble the 30 million to 60 million tiny segments of the genetic material that needs sequencing—a task the supercomputing research team in part is charged with fulfilling. The new IBM supercomputer can perform an amazing 5.7 trillion calculations per second. It has 2,048 processors and comes with 11 trillion bytes of data storage. With the delivery of its new supercomputer, ISU now ranks on an academic short list of U.S. universities possessing the 10 most powerful supercomputers on college campuses across the nation.

Four institutions in total are working on the project, the timeline for which is three years and carrying a $29.5 million price tag. Along with ISU, principle researcher Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.), the University of Arizona and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., are also involved. The ISU research team is being led by Arinivas Aluru, an ISU professor of electrical and computer engineering. Aluru's team members include ISU professors Robert Jernigan, Patrick Schnable and Arun Somani.

The research team was awarded $600,000 on behalf of The National Science Foundation to help purchase the supercomputer, a sum representing just less than half of the supercomputer's total cost of $1.25 million. The remaining cost was covered by ISU; specifically, funds were provided through allocations from ISU's President's Office, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Information Technology Services and the Plant Sciences Institute.

In related news, two ISU researchers are serving on the editorial board that's launching a new scientific quarterly publication called The Plant Genome, a peer-reviewed scientific journal put out by Crop Science Society of America, according to a Feb. 15 ISU release. The two ISU researchers on the editorial board of the new quarterly are Randy Shoemaker, an ISU professor of agronomy and a research geneticist for the USDA's Agricultural Research Service; and Kendall Lamkey, interim chair of the ISU Department of Agronomy and director of the Raymond F. Baker Center for Plant Breeding at ISU. Lamkey is also editor of Crop Science, the flagship publication of the Crop Science Society of America.