Colorado State Supercomputer Aids Cattle Ranchers Worldwide
Tuesday, November 11, 1997
FORT COLLINS--A Colorado State University supercomputer
powered with enough memory to run 150 laptops helps ranchers
around the world build better cows.
The Colorado State Agricultural Genetics Beowulf
Supercomputer has one of the largest databases of livestock in
the country, with more than 3 million cattle representing 15
breeds worldwide. The aim of the project is to use the vast
information about the reproductive histories of cattle to help
ranchers produce livestock with better features, such as tastier
meat and increased milk productivity.
The supercomputer, equipped with 2 gigabytes of memory and
enough disk space to fill 30,000 floppy disks, is so powerful
that livestock geneticists are able to answer complex questions
in a day that would have otherwise taken hundreds of days to
solve.
The beauty of the Beowulf supercomputer is that it is
essentially a network of 16 personal computers built with off-
the-shelf hardware and high-end components. The entire project
cost only $45,000--a fraction of the cost for traditional
supercomputers, which can run in the hundreds of thousands or
millions of dollars. In addition, the software to run the Beowulf
supercomputer was downloaded off the Internet for free.
"With this relatively inexpensive technology, we can take
highly theoretical questions and get real answers that have
eluded us for years," said Bruce Golden, associate professor of
breeding and genetics and the project's lead researcher. "This
has opened up a completely new avenue for the cattle industry."
Golden said computers have been used at Colorado State to
analyze genetics of cattle for the past 12 years, but the older
technology limited the kinds of answers ranchers and breeders
could retrieve on how well certain sires did in producing top-
notch offspring. Traditional supercomputers were too costly to
replace the older system, Golden said. When he learned the
Beowulf setup was being used at other universities for a fraction
of the cost, Golden discovered a whole new realm of number-
crunching.
For example, Beowulf can search the breeding history of
nearly 9,000 Red Angus dating back to the 1930s and, in one day,
identify sires that contributed the most genes to calves born in
a given year. Information contained in this database is so large
that it would have taken conventional computers 71 days to return
the same answer.
Golden points out that one of the largest costs for cattle
ranchers is the purchase of heifers to replace cows in the herd
that have difficulties delivering calves, producing milk or that
easily contract disease. With Beowulf, ranchers can avoid those
problems altogether by selecting sires with genes that don't
consistently produce daughters with reproductive problems. Golden
estimates that about 100,000 cattle breeders worldwide make
livestock breeding decisions based on data generated from
Colorado State's supercomputer.
"Before, we were limited by the technology as to what we
could do," Golden said. "We would not have even asked the
questions we are asking today because it would have been
impossible to for the old technology to retrieve the answer."
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