Dr. Kirk W. Cameron, leader of the SCAPE laboratory and an associate professor in Computer Science, has received an IBM Faculty Award for his work entitled "Building the Tree of Life on IBM Blue Gene/L and the Cell Broadband Engine." This award, in collaboration with postdoctoral fellow Dr. Xizhou Feng, will fund research with IBM researchers Carlos Sosa and Brian Smith to execute a new parallel implementation of the Bayesian phylogenetic inference method for DNA sequence data on the IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer and the Cell Broadband Engine. The PBPI software identifies
equivalent tree estimates almost 1500 times faster than the most widely-used, best-available sequential program and scales superlinearly to 4096 nodes. Says Cameron, "We are very excited about the opportunity to formalize our ongoing relationship with IBM. This award will enable us to exploit the high-performance characteristics of IBM hardware to answer important open questions in plant phylogeny."