This week Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) 
announced a grant competition aimed at computational scientists. The Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics Award Program will donate five of the company's Xserve-based workgroup clusters "to five of America's most important, innovative and scientific research projects."
A panel of seven judges composed of four Apple managers working in this space; two principals from The BioTeam, a developer of bioinformatics applications; and an assistant professor in bioinformatics at Stockholm University will choose the five winners.
Applicants have until midnight June 13th to apply to the program. Apple will announce the names of winning recipients on June 29th at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
IDC life sciences computing analyst Mike Swenson commented that this program represents Apple's continued effort in bolstering its position in the scientific market.
"Hardware grants to certain groups is a classic strategy to gain strength in the research and development community," Swenson told MacNewsWorld.
Building Awareness
Elizabeth Kerr, Ph.D, director of science and technology markets at Apple and one of the judges for the competition, was forthcoming in saying that building market awareness was a key motivator for establishing this contest.
In an interview with MacNewsWorld, Kerr said that Apple wants to build on the recent BIO IT annual meeting, in which the Apple Workgroup Cluster won best-in-show in the "IT Infrastructure for Workgroup-Specific Solutions" category.
"Our goal is to build on this momentum and [gain] a larger breadth of customers" in the scientific community, Kerr explained, adding that Mac OS X has generated a nice resurgence of growth in that space because of its Unix base and overall ease-of-use.
It remains to be seen whether this program will turn into an annual event, Kerr said. "We have to see how well received it will be, although we think we have a good model -- or we wouldn't be doing it, obviously."
The Criteria
Bill Van Etten, Ph.D, a principal at The BioTeam, said in an e-mail interview that he and the other judges will "select the best applications based on the applicant's scientific record, the likelihood that this project will discover something novel using the award and the likelihood that this research focus would yield methods or discoveries applicable to the broader life science community."
When asked what sorts of people or organizations he predicted would apply for these awards, Van Etten said they quite literally could be anyone and, for that matter, he could not anticipate the types of projects that would be put forth.
"However it is probably safe to assume that the data analysis required to perform the experiment [in question] will be very much computationally intensive, or [the applicant] wouldn't need a cluster to answer it."
What the Winners Get
The five winners will each receive a four-node Apple Xserve-based Workgroup Cluster made up of four dual-processor Xserve G5s with 2 GB RAM; BioTeam's iNquiry, the software used to turn a group of Xserves into a virtual supercomputer optimized for bioinformatics; 200 pre-installed bioinformatics applications; an XtremeMac Xrack Pro sound-suppressing enclosure; an Asanté GX-800 Gigabit Ethernet switch, an APC Smart-UPS 2200 VA power supply; all the cabling necessary to put this cluster together; and three years of AppleCare service and support 
.
According to an Apple representative, each of these configured Workgroup Clusters carry an MSRP of about US$40,000, although academic pricing for these cluster is somewhat lower.
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