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SA researchers get supertool
13/12/2006 11:08 - (SA)
Johannesburg - Scientists in South Africa
unveiled the country's most powerful weapon yet in their fight
against Aids, malaria and tuberculosis when they switched on a
new supercomputer dedicated to scientific research this week.
The supercomputer, which has been installed at the Council
for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) offices in
Pretoria, is designed to process huge amounts of complex
information and to deliver data with astonishing speed.
It is available free of charge to local scientists testing
the effectiveness of vaccines and other treatments for the many
illnesses which plague Africa and make life a misery for millions.
The computer is expected to be a boost for local researchers
by allowing them to assess the structure of the HIV virus more
quickly and accurately than in any physical laboratory, said
Winston Hide, Director of the South African National
Bioinformatics Institute, at the University of the Western Cape.
"It's like using the brightest possible search light in a
cave as opposed to a torch," he said. "It offers another
approach to the same problem... by speeding up what we're doing
dramatically."
"A researcher can sit in their office with a specific
problem, log in, and input in genetic data from a virus... to
simulate what would happen in a Petrie dish," said Albert
Gazendam, an engineer with Pretoria's Meraka Institute.
Speeding up the cycle
"It's all about speeding up the cycle of research."
Costing $1m and roughly the size of four
refrigerators, it links 64 processors in two high performance
systems for a peak operating speed of one teraflop, which
equates to a trillion floating point operations per second
(FLOPS).
That level of power can generate about one billion
mathematical equations per second - saving hundreds of hours in
human calculations and precious time for millions of Africans
suffering from fatal disease in need of innovative solutions.
The supercomputer was donated by Intel Co-operation to the
CSIR, a government arm tasked with leading scientific and
technology research.
The supercomputer can reveal how disease jumps from one
person to the next and then track its movement throughout the
body.
It has the potential to predict how the immune system of a
sick person would react to drugs and analyses the building
blocks of life like genetic activity and protein structure for
new medical clues.
The fastest supercomputer in the world is Blue Gene/L at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California with a
performance of 280.6 teraflops.
- Reuters
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