Fighting disease, one molecule at a time
TORONTO, June 9 /CNW/ - Scientists at the Hospital for Sick Children are working to improve your health -- and they're doing it on a computer. The world-class computing power of SciNet, Canada's newest supercomputer, has allowed Dr. Régis Pomés and his team to conduct fundamental health research.
"In order to study biological systems at the molecular level, we use SciNet to perform simulations on thousands of computers simultaneously," says Dr. Pomés. "SciNet has completely changed our perspective on our own work. We are no longer making incremental progress; instead, we are implementing new approaches we weren't even dreaming of before."
Case in point: over the past six months, these theory-based biochemists have gained fundamental insight into the molecular mechanisms that underpin the elasticity of skin and blood vessels, the mode of action of a new Alzheimer's drug candidate, and the battle between our immune systems and the bacteria that make us sick. Their findings were reported at the High Performance Computing Symposium (HPCS), Canada's foremost supercomputing conference, by PhD students Grace Li, Chris Neale and Sarah Rauscher.
More information is available at http://hpcs.ca/press/sickkids.
About SciNet:
SciNet is Canada's largest supercomputer centre, providing Canadian researchers with the computational resources and expertise necessary to perform their research on scales not previously possible in Canada, from the biomedical sciences and aerospace engineering to astrophysics and climate science. More information is available at http://www.scinet.utoronto.ca .
About HPCS2010:
The High Performance Computing Symposium is Canada's foremost research supercomputing conference. The 24th HPCS takes place at the University of Toronto on June 5-9, with the theme of `Data Intensive Computing: Across Disciplines, Across Canada'. More information is available at http://hpcs.ca/press.
For further information: Media Contact: Jillian Dempsey, [email protected], (416) 978-2922, SciNet HPC Consortium
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