HPC from A-Z (part 13) - M

M is for Medicine

High Performance Computing can assist with medical research, helping researchers and scientists achieve tangible and game changing results. It can speed up the time taken to crunch vital medical data from a wide variety of sources -- from breast cancer scans to DNA profiles. I expect the next medical breakthrough will have been powered in some part by High Performance Computing.

One of our customers, Harvard Medical School, has taken advantage of High Performance Computing to help aid their scientific discovery. Dr Marcos Athanasoulis, Dr. PH, Director of IT, HMS summed up the potential of High Performance Computing very neatly: “High performance computing is just at the center of discovery today and it’s personally gratifying for me that we are enabling researchers to one day find the cure for cancer, to continue the discovery and genomics and proteomics and that the impact of our work here can actually make a big difference on alleviating human suffering caused by disease.” He also said, “the internal grid allows our researchers to collaborate more easily than ever before and focus their attention on medical research instead of IT management.”

It is encouraging to see how HPC is being used to help researchers collaborate on finding a cure for some of the world's most devastating diseases. Another example is the FightAIDS@Home project which has set up an HPC grid in order to utilize idle computing cycles to assist in building on our growing knowledge of the structural biology of AIDS. It’s incredible to think of all the home users across to world contributing to the project!