Sci-Tech Information: Japanese Research Team to Build Supercomputer for Drug Development
The Riken Research Institute, a Japanese government-backed natural sciences research center, is looking to build a highly specialized supercomputer that will be used to analyze proteins - a highly complicated and repetitive task.
The said supercomputer is envisioned to be the most powerful of its kind when it goes online later this year, as Riken has already finished work on the basic design and underlying technology.
The supercomputer will be used to model protein structure changes in just one day - around 100 times faster than the €K computer,€ Japan's reigning fastest and most powerful computer.
Japanese electronics and technology giant Hitachi helped develop the hardware for the supercomputer project, estimated to cost around 800 million yen (around US$7.55 million) when it gets done. The whole machine will be around the size of four bookcases and will be online at Riken's Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe.
Riken says that it will allow Japanese universities and pharmaceutical companies use the new computer, giving them a competitive advantage globally in drug research and development.
Biotechnology is becoming the foundation behind the development of cancer therapies, and it seems that the key to battling this disease increasingly lies in how quickly researchers can grasp the complex structures of proteins implicated in disease.
Riken is taking an example from leading American and European pharmaceutical firms who are already actively using supercomputers for this purpose. No global rankings exist for supercomputers in this field, but Riken claims that this new machine will be faster than any drug research supercomputer available today.
Australia's new supercomputer a boon for climate scientists
Australia's most powerful computer was unveiled Wednesday, in a boost for climate scientists who need to crunch vast amounts of data to make forecasts and pinpoint extreme weather, officials said.
The Australian National University in Canberra has named the supercomputer Raijin after the Japanese god of thunder, lightning and storms.
"You could say that we in the climate science community have a need for speed," the head of the Bureau of Meteorology Rob Vertessy said.
"The simple fact is that supercomputer capacity is a major determinant of our success in this field, but it's always been a struggle to secure access to it."
Lindsay Botten, director of the ANU's National Computational Infrastructure centre where the computer is housed, said the machine can handle complex simulations and modelling much faster and at a higher resolution than previously available in Australia.
"Advanced computational methods form an increasingly essential component of high-impact research, in many cases underpinning discoveries that cannot be achieved by other means," he said.
Predicting extreme weather, which Australia frequently experiences, required millions of lines of code and complex information to be processed in an instant, said Andy Pitman from the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
"You cannot do that on your home computer, you need a seriously large system in order to do that kind of processing," he said. "And fortunately we now have one of those."
The machine, estimated to be the 27th most powerful computer in the world, weighs 70 tonnes and has 57,000 processing cores (the equal of about 15,000 laptop computers) and 160 terabytes of memory (the equivalent of about 30,000 laptops).
The supercomputer was funded as part of Australia's infrastructure-building stimulus package in the wake of the global financial crisis.
sources: http://en.twwtn.com/Information/21_56092.html
The said supercomputer is envisioned to be the most powerful of its kind when it goes online later this year, as Riken has already finished work on the basic design and underlying technology.
The supercomputer will be used to model protein structure changes in just one day - around 100 times faster than the €K computer,€ Japan's reigning fastest and most powerful computer.
Japanese electronics and technology giant Hitachi helped develop the hardware for the supercomputer project, estimated to cost around 800 million yen (around US$7.55 million) when it gets done. The whole machine will be around the size of four bookcases and will be online at Riken's Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe.
Riken says that it will allow Japanese universities and pharmaceutical companies use the new computer, giving them a competitive advantage globally in drug research and development.
Biotechnology is becoming the foundation behind the development of cancer therapies, and it seems that the key to battling this disease increasingly lies in how quickly researchers can grasp the complex structures of proteins implicated in disease.
Riken is taking an example from leading American and European pharmaceutical firms who are already actively using supercomputers for this purpose. No global rankings exist for supercomputers in this field, but Riken claims that this new machine will be faster than any drug research supercomputer available today.
Australia's new supercomputer a boon for climate scientists
Australia's most powerful computer was unveiled Wednesday, in a boost for climate scientists who need to crunch vast amounts of data to make forecasts and pinpoint extreme weather, officials said.
The Australian National University in Canberra has named the supercomputer Raijin after the Japanese god of thunder, lightning and storms.
"You could say that we in the climate science community have a need for speed," the head of the Bureau of Meteorology Rob Vertessy said.
"The simple fact is that supercomputer capacity is a major determinant of our success in this field, but it's always been a struggle to secure access to it."
Lindsay Botten, director of the ANU's National Computational Infrastructure centre where the computer is housed, said the machine can handle complex simulations and modelling much faster and at a higher resolution than previously available in Australia.
"Advanced computational methods form an increasingly essential component of high-impact research, in many cases underpinning discoveries that cannot be achieved by other means," he said.
Predicting extreme weather, which Australia frequently experiences, required millions of lines of code and complex information to be processed in an instant, said Andy Pitman from the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
"You cannot do that on your home computer, you need a seriously large system in order to do that kind of processing," he said. "And fortunately we now have one of those."
The machine, estimated to be the 27th most powerful computer in the world, weighs 70 tonnes and has 57,000 processing cores (the equal of about 15,000 laptop computers) and 160 terabytes of memory (the equivalent of about 30,000 laptops).
The supercomputer was funded as part of Australia's infrastructure-building stimulus package in the wake of the global financial crisis.
sources: http://en.twwtn.com/Information/21_56092.html
