Race biotechnology with supercomputers

The two most powerful supercomputers in the world today are responsible for analyzing proteins instead of processing numbers. That's because life science, not physics, is putting the most difficult and challenging computing problems in place.

The US and Japan are competing fiercely with each other to become the top biotech nation similar to the race to explore the universe.

Japanese researchers have built a $ 9 million supercomputer called MDGrape-3 and is said to be the first system to exceed petaflop. Petaflop is the unit that measures the computing power of a computer with the ability to perform 1,000,000,000,000 calculations per second. It operates three times faster than the current world-ranked system Blue Gene / L produced by IBM.

Born to study biology

Source: Biotech Both MDGrape-3 and BlueGene / L are basically built with a common purpose. They are not used to perform "lofty" tasks such as domestic security or calculating global warming rates that are designed to test new drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies now own tens of thousands of new chemical compounds and they want to know how each of those compounds relates to millions of different proteins in the human body. In addition, proteins are complex amino acid sequences, so need to be mapped to 3D.

MDGrape-3 has not been recognized as the fastest system in the world because it is not compatible with the software used to rank supercomputers. But that doesn't matter to big pharmaceutical companies like Merck (USA). The company asked Japanese researchers to build the Protein Explorer project on MDGrape-3 and it would notify them after just a few seconds if a newly introduced compound and a certain protein would fit. together or not.

Meanwhile, IBM also offered BlueGene to US firm QuantumBio to test proteins. In order to compete with rivals, IBM is building a copy of Blue Gene / L for its own Japanese pharmaceutical research specialists.

Time of biotechnology

All of this proves that the dream of forming a human genetic map from 2000 is coming true. The 21st century is a period of biotechnology. The ability to build gene sequences as well as protein maps will change the health industry. For example, people can go to the clinic to reorganize DNA, detect diseases quickly and implant a chemical compound that has been calculated by supercomputers in accordance with the protein in the body.

In contrast, the growing demand from biotechnology will boost computer supercomputer. The scientific terms used to be unfamiliar to humans such as in the field of genes, proteins, biological data analysis algorithms . will soon become popular vocabulary that everyone understands.