National Institutes of Health (NIH) - National Heart Lung and Blood Insitute (NHLBI) - Laboratory of Biophysical Chemistry - Computational Biophysics Section

The LoBoS Supercomputers are an implementation of Beowulf-class supercomputing at the Computational Biophysics Section run by Bernard Brooks at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. LoBoS, which stands for Lots of Boxes on Shelves, is an ensemble of PCs connected with high speed networks to achieve supercomputer performance at substantial savings. The strategy is to build a supercomputer using lots of commodity-priced processors in place of a few expensive "supercomputer" processors to achieve a reduction in the overall price of computation by a factor of 10 or more. The current configuration allows scientists within the collaborating laboratories to study more complex biological systems using computational methods. The LoBoS business model is to purchase the fastest commodity processors available, use them for 18 to 24 months, and then migrate them to the desktop environment.