National Cancer Institute acquires SGI supercomputer to aid cancer researchMountain View 04 Aug 99 NCI chose the Cray SV1 supercomputer as cancer researchers worldwide increasingly incorporate the latest high-speed computational methods into their studies. "Supercomputing's importance to cancer research will only increase in the coming years as studies move forward in defining the molecular causes of cancer," said Jacob Maizel Jr., an NCI scientist and a founder of NCI's Advanced Biomedical Computing Center (ABCC). For biologists, supercomputer-based simulations can provide a level of detail that is almost impossible to obtain from laboratory work. Current supercomputers can quickly produce models that simulate the complete chemical structure of various regions of a human protein all the way down to fine subatomic detail. These simulations, in turn, can be used to predict the folding patterns of the protein. Folding patterns are now a major area of research interest because of their importance in determining how these protein structures move or interact with other proteins and drugs. According to Stan Burt, Ph.D., director of NCI's ABCC, supercomputing will likely play a key role in translating recent advances in gene discovery into new, more targeted cancer treatments. "One of the great opportunities in cancer research today is to find molecules in tumor cells that are driving the tumor's growth and target those molecules directly with drugs or other treatments. As more of these molecular targets are identified, computational biology can play a key role in defining their precise chemical structure, which is critical to designing compounds that can reliably hit these targets," said Burt. Among its past accomplishments, NCI played a key role in solving the three-dimensional structure of HIV-1 protease, an enzyme that HIV uses to infect human immune cells. With the three-dimensional structure clarified, scientists were able to design highly effective protease inhibitors, now the mainstay of AIDS therapy. The 96-processor Cray SV1 supercomputer from SGI has a combined computing power of 115 billion calculations per second (gigaflops), or enough capacity to process in one day a computational task that would take a high-end Pentium computer about four years to complete. The system is tightly coupled in a cluster of four separate "nodes" of 32 and 16 processors. Burt said that with the new Cray SV1 system, the prospects for future computational successes will be enhanced. "The Cray SV1 supercomputer represents a significant resource for the entire biological research community. It is a powerful machine with lots of memory, and users will find it to be a valuable tool in sorting out the functions of the genes and proteins involved in their diseases of interest." Other SGI systems that also will be available at NCI are a 64-processor SGI Origin 2000 system, two Cray J90 supercomputers and a PowerChallenge system.
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