Sun backs bio-IT research 

Boston -- Sun Microsystems is teaming up with seven universities in North Carolina to aid research into the building blocks of life.

On Tuesday, Sun announced that it was forming the Sun North Carolina Research Triangle Center of Excellence (COE) in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Through the COE, Sun and its partner companies will provide computing hardware, software, and services to academic researchers working in the fields of genomics and proteomics, according to the statement.

Genomics is a field concerned with mapping, sequencing, and analyzing an organism’s complete set of DNA, or "genome."

Proteomics studies proteomes (the protein complement to genomes) in an effort to understand biologic processes, helping to understand disease processes at the molecular level, for example.

Sun's support will be in the form of discounts on the company's hardware and software, according to Stefan Unger, business development manager for computational biology at Sun.

The total value of the hardware, software and services from Sun will be approximately $6 million, according to Sun.

The goal of the COE is to provide better research tools and training for researchers in those fields. The COE also has the goal of developing a distributed computing environment to facilitate collaboration between the universities and corporations in the COE, according to Sun.

The new Sun initiative will operate as a "virtual Center of Excellence," encouraging collaboration between the participating universities and business partners, but not consolidating computing resources in one location, according to Sun.

The close proximity of the members made a separate COE site unnecessary, according to Unger.

"We had a high number of really good schools in a relatively tight and consistent area," Unger said.

The COE will encourage collaboration between the member organizations by coordinating meetings, holding events, and co-sponsoring scientific meetings, according to Unger.

However, details of how the universities will actually share information were not available, and may have to wait for the completion of a larger project to develop a regional computing grid, BioGRID, for use by the researchers.

"We're not claiming that this is going to be the thing that brings everybody into one big happy family. The emphasis of the COE is on research and researchers," Unger said.

Among the institutions that will take part in the COE are Duke University, North Carolina State University (NCSU), and the University of North Carolina (UNC).

Sun will work with each institution in the COE to provide the necessary computing resources.

Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy will use Sun equipment to study the genetic and epidemiological basis of human disease. Sun hardware will also be used in a lab for research into bioinformatics and computational biology.