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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/05/10/shared-memory-pushes-wheat-genomics-boost-crop-yields/ [nextplatform.com]

Wheat has been an important part of the human diet for the past 9,000 years or so, and depending on the geography can comprise up to 40 percent to 50 percent of the diet within certain regions today. But there is a problem. Pathogens and changing climate are adversely affecting wheat yields just as Earth's population is growing, and the Genome Analysis Center (TGAC) is front and center in sequencing and assembling the wheat genome, a multi-year effort that is going to be substantially accelerated by some hardware and updated software.

[...] TGAC, which gets its funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council in England, provided the computing power that let researchers deliver a first draft of the wheat genome last November [tgac.ac.uk], a milestone in the project. That effort delivered a genome assembly with 98,974 genes, which TGAC reckons is about 91 percent of the total genome for the plant; it weighs in at 13.4 GB, which is pretty fat for a text file. But work still needs to be done to fill in gaps in the wheat genome, which is not expected to be fully completed until around 2018 or so. (BBSRC invested over £509 million in various life sciences projects in 2014 and 2015 and has spent over £100 million alone on wheat research in the past decade.)

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