IBM to Provide Engine for Protein Structure Prediction Research

September 7, 2004 - (HostReview.com) - IBM (www.ibm.com) announced today that AIST, a leading Japanese research laboratory, will use an IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer to advance their research in proteins, potentially accelerating breakthroughs in drug design.

"One of our biggest research challenges is to apply data obtained from genome decoding to protein engineering and drug design. The scale of simulation this requires cannot be done without the help of supercomputers," said Dr. Yutaka Akiyama, director, Computational Biology Research Center, AIST. "IBM's BlueGene/L supercomputer provides us with a massive supercomputing resource that will dramatically accelerate our work."

The Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC) of The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) will use the extreme computational power of BlueGene/L to better predict 3-D protein structures, key to understanding how drugs interact with diseases. IBM Research and AIST are also exploring possible areas for joint research using application software IBM has specifically designed to tackle protein simulations on BlueGene/L.

Expected to be installed in February 2005, the BlueGene/L system will consist of four racks, with a peak processing speed of 22.8 trillion calculations per second, or 22.8 teraflops.

The AIST scientists are developing parallel and distributed computing techniques for solving large-scale data processing and searching problems in bioinformatics. The team is also creating high performance computer applications for molecular simulation, mass spectrometry analysis, and cell simulation.

If it were installed today, this supercomputer would rank third in the world on the list of the Top 500 supercomputers announced in June 2004. Two early prototype BlueGene/L supercomputers were ranked as the fourth and eighth largest supercomputers in the world in June (http://www.top500.org/list/2004/06/).

These systems exploit the advanced processors based on IBM's Power Architecture. Earlier this year, IBM announced its Power Everywhere initiative, designed to make this same IBM Power Architecture more widely available for everything from consumer electronics to supercomputers.

Blue Gene is an IBM supercomputing project which is creating a new family of supercomputers optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today's fastest systems.

The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) is an Independent Administrative Institution (IAI) under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan. AIST is Japan's largest public research organization with 25 research centers, 20 research institutes, 5 research initiatives nationwide and around 3,200 employees.