High computing promises elixir of life

SINGAPORE--I bet your children will live up till 150 years old, declares Kirk E. Jordan, who hedges that high-performance computing (HPC) can help prolong human life.

Jordan, emerging solutions executive of IBM's U.S. computational science center, is betting his prediction on ground-breaking efforts researchers are working that focuses on healthcare.

Speaking to ZDNet Asia in an interview Thursday, the IBMer noted that within the healthcare sector, there are ongoing projects to explore ways to detect and prevent heart attacks--30 years before the victim suffers the attack. This, and other solutions, are made possible by advances in technology and will help lengthen the lives of future generations, he said.

HPC also supported research in a collaboration between IBM scientists and the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) in 2008 that discovered microRNAs, said Janis Landry-Lane, IBM's program director for deep computing, who also sat in for the interview. An important regulatory component in the machinery of living cells, microRNAs are small molecules that regulate the differentiation of stem cells and determine how genes are made.

"The work is expected to provide new insights on cell process regulation and how it relates to the onset of diseases such as cancers, neurodegenerative disorders, diabetes and others," according to IBM. "It is also expected to suggest future avenues for novel diagnostics and the development of therapeutics."

Environment is another key focus area for researchers, said Jordan, who cited examples of simulations that look at global weather trends for different time scales as advance as 1,000 years, to determine more possible patterns.

Asked what IBM is working on to advance HPC in the near future, he said: "We're committed to building an exascale HPC machine--which is 1,000 times faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world currently--within the next decade."

However, he noted that the challenge would then be to ensure the "various HPC architectures work together". Citing a project IBM had worked on in New Zealand to figure out how blood flows within the brain, Jordan highlighted that two different HPC architectures were needed to study the circulation within bigger arteries and smaller, "tree fiber-like" blood channels.

Landry-Lane said: "It's really to look into how we input complex situations into different HPC architectures, get them to work together, and extract the results from them."

Region's fastest supercomp launched
Both IBMers were in town for the opening of Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) HPC Center here Thursday. Jordan is also the appointed technical advocate for NTU's HPC center.

The NTU HPC is based on 300 units of IBM System x iDataPlex dx360 M2 servers, powered by Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and supported by two symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers, and one unit of 600 terabytes (TB) IBM System Storage DCS9900.

It is currently the fastest supercomputer in the Asean region, but had dropped to 390th position in the Top500 supercomputer list. The system is also the 29th most energy-efficient system on the Green500 list at 274.64 megaflops (millions of floating point operations per second) per watt, Landry-Lane noted.

"While the most important statistic for supercomputers is the Top500 list, the second is the Green500 list," she added. "In time, it will be more important to be among the top in the Green500 list for energy efficiency in supercomputers."

The importance of green is seen in NTU's HPC system with the IBM Rear Door Heat eXchanger, which Soh Yeng Chai, interim director of the HPC Center and associate dean of research for the university's college of engineering, said helps reduce electrical consumption by "30 percent".

Soh noted: "HPC centers are usually freezing because cold air is needed to keep the machines cool, but with the [IBM Heat eXchanger} system, water is pumped into the back frame at 17 degrees Celsius to extract the heat. This brings down overall temperature and what you get is a datacenter that is comfortable to be in."

Landry-Lane added that the system helps remove more than 100 percent of heat generated by the machine.

Soh also noted that the power usage might go down further if the NTU used a dedicated chiller. The school currently forks out an annual fee of S$80,000 (US$56,336) to maintain the HPC Center.

Soh said about 100 professors and researchers currently use the supercomputer, with the load at "80 to 85 percent", but he expects usage to exceed capacity by year's end when the system will be utilized by "300 to 400" researchers.

"We will look to scale up on our compute nodes and [IBM's] InfiniBand capabilities at the end of the year, but our storage space is fine [for now]," said Soh.

The increased investment will meet the needs of increasing collaborations with companies such as Rolls-Royce UK and Vestas, which Soh said have been partners with the NTU in other projects.

Queried on the areas the school is looking to leverage its HPC capabilities, Soh said: "There are four areas: water and environment, energy, healthcare and interactive digital media.

"However, my immediate task is to introduce [image] virtualization capabilities, so that people looking into areas such as aerodynamics will be able to better research into the airflow simulation models."