Rice University will help advance the biomedical research field with a $7.6 million donation awarded by IBM, as part of the company's Shared University Award. The showpiece of this donation is an IBM POWER7-based supercomputer, nicknamed BlueBioU, which will help scientists at Rice University and Texas Medical Center research and study cancer, AIDS and other complex diseases.

"These computers are able to handle information and analyze it and come up with results that can hopefully help researchers find cures for some of these diseases," says Rick Bause, IBM product manager.

BlueBioU is actually composed of 18 to 20 smaller computers, explains Bause. This particular processor - POWER7 - is brand new; Rice University is one of its first customers, he says.
BlueBioU is an extremely powerful machine; it is able to calculate 18.8 teraflops or trillion FLoating point Operations Per Second. This power will allow scientists not only to compute faster, but also do large projects, all running simultaneously to maximize efficiency.

Kamran Khan, Rice University's vice provost for information technology, and Rice University computer science professor, Vivek Sarkar, are extremely excited about what opportunities the supercomputer will offer to biomedical researchers who hail from Rice University, the Texas Medical Center, the Baylor College of Medicine and other Texas-area institutions.

BlueBioU's ample energy and speed allows the university's scientists and researchers at the Texas Medical Center to conduct a greater number of large projects and experiments, such as genomics sequencing, which will help researchers find treatments and cures for complex diseases, Sarkar explains. For example, using BlueBioU to study genomic sequences can help create personalized medicine because the computer can correlate simulation cells with the DNA sequences of patients involved, he says.

"In terms of genomics personalized medicine, there's not one cure that fits all," Sarkar says. "The key is to tailor the cure based on personal genetic history. This computer can run bigger jobs faster for this [research]."

But even with access to the latest in high-performance computer technology, computing alone won't find a cure for diseases like cancer and AIDS.

"The really interesting point is, how do you link from basic research [using the computer] to cures for diseases?" asks Sarkar. "It's not as though I can point to anything that's running on the machine today and say, 'that's a guaranteed cure.' ... If all it took to cure disease would be to get a faster computer, we'd already be there."

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