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HOUSTON -- March 2, 2010 -- Rice University and IBM today unveiled a new high-performance computing (HPC) initiative for biomedical and life sciences research that features one of the most powerful supercomputers in the Texas Medical Center. Rice scientists will use the supercomputer in collaboration with researchers from across the medical center to study cancer, AIDS and other complex diseases. The POWER 750 supercomputer is the centerpiece of a $7.6 Million IBM Shared University Research (SUR) award to Rice for advanced biomedical research. The award -- the largest for HPC infrastructure in Rice's history -- also includes HPC software, services and life sciences expertise from IBM. Dubbed "Blue BioU," the HPC project will bring together researchers from Rice, IBM and collaborating partners within the Texas Medical Center. The supercomputer at Rice is the first system deployed with IBM's new POWER7 microprocessors, which make it especially attractive for researchers faced with computationally demanding and memory-intensive problems often encountered in biomedical and life sciences research. For example, the system will be particularly useful for genomic sequencing, protein folding, drug modeling and simulations of molecular-level interactions in tissues. In addition, the real-time analytics capabilities of the POWER7 hardware and software are well-suited for mining vast genomic and medical databases for clues to new treatment options and cures for complex diseases. Capable of 18 teraflops -- or 18 trillion floating point calculations per second -- the Blue BioU platform is as powerful as the combined total of Rice's existing supercomputers.