IBM deploys supercomp to boost cancer research

The new system will aid in the search for more effective cancer treatments and facilitates analysis of millions of images of proteins.

IBM has announced the deployment of Canada's fastest research supercomputer at the Ontario Cancer Institute in the University Health Network.

The new system will aid in the search for more effective cancer treatments and facilitates analysis of millions of images of proteins.

Through automation, high resolution imaging and sophisticated computer-based image classification, researchers are attempting to more quickly identify the structure of disease-related proteins, and thus improve our ability to design new treatments for cancer.

The new IBM System Cluster 1350 supercomputer incorporates its recently announced DCS9550 disk storage system, as well as deep computing visualisation to create high-resolution images required for the research analysis.

The system includes 1,344 processor cores in the Linux cluster running at 12.5 teraflops (trillion calculations per second) with 150 TB of storage, making it one of the fastest research clusters in Canada.

“We need to better understand the specific function and interactions of proteins that cause cancer,” Igor Jurisica of Ontario Cancer Institute said, adding that this research will enable to diagnose cancer earlier, before symptoms appear, to have the best chance of treating disease.

The supercomputer was made possible by grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation and an in-kind donation by IBM for the hardware, software and services.

The computing complex also houses a custom-built data centre, which has been adapted to fit into Toronto's historic MaRS research building.

In November 2007, Jurisica's research was added to the World Community Grid as a Help Conquer Cancer project. The grid works on a network of approximately one million PCs and laptops using donated processing time.

The Ontario Cancer Institute's new supercomputer will allow data to get on the Grid for complex analysis, and enable faster and more detailed analysis of results from the Grid computation.

In simple terms, this supercomputer can do more calculations in one second than every Canadian doing one calculation per second for four days without stopping.