UW researchers win award from Apple Computer

UW researchers win award from Apple Computer

Apple provides cluster computers to biology professors to meet their
computational needs

MADISON – A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison statisticians has nabbed one of Apple’s Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics awards.
Professor Michael Newton and his colleagues, Douglas Bates, Sunduz Keles, Christina Kendziorski and Bret Larget, took the prize for their statistical analysis of biological data.
Some of the fields they work in are comparative genomics, statistical genetics, cancer biology, gene expression analysis and optical genome mapping. And the kind of statistical analysis required to answer questions in these fields can take a lot of computing power.
The prize is a cluster of four dual-processor Xserve G5 servers, networking equipment and accessories, and Inquiry, a software package from BioTeam that includes about 200 open-source life science applications and is optimized for use in clusters.
According to Apple, the award program is meant to reward innovative scientists with equipment that will help them continue their research. Out of hundreds of applicants, the judges – two from BioTeam, one from the Pasteur Institute and one from Stockholm University – chose five winners.
The other four winners were Deborah Dean of the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute and professors Edward DeLong of MIT, Christopher Lee of the University of California-Los Angeles and Simon Lin of Duke University.