Super bird flu fighter: high tech
Supercomputer could fight bird flu
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 18, 2006
If IBM and Scripps Florida can pry $18 million in grants from the state and Palm Beach County, they will begin to build the world's largest supercomputer in Boca Raton starting Oct. 1.
The supercomputer would be used to study bird flu and other infectious diseases. Eventually, it could help to transform the city into a research mecca with a university-affiliated Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at its hub, attracting scientific and technological talent and businesses who want access to the King Kong computer.
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The two partners in Project Checkmate, a research effort against bird flu and other emerging diseases, outlined how the initiative will grow over five years in a $544 million proposal submitted to the county in July and released this week.
The plan will serve as a basis for negotiations with the Palm Beach County Commission.
The two sides hopes to hammer out a deal for $9 million in job-growth incentives sometime in September.
If it's approved, the proposal goes to the state of Florida for another $9 million.
The county commission gave the plan conceptual approval on Tuesday.
"We won't bring IBM and Scripps back to the commission until we have a contract," Deputy County Administrator Verdenia Baker said.
IBM and Scripps are asking the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to tap $7.2 billion earmarked for pandemic preparedness for most of the project's budget.
But they are also approaching nonprofits such as the Waitt Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The two local outfits expect to expand the project in three phases through 2011.
Today, IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer in New York is modeling a single hemagglutinin protein, the substance that makes the bird flu deadly.
Ultimately, Boca's Blue Gene will be capable of 1.2 quadrillion computations a second, enough to do computer modeling of 11,250 different combinations of viral-protein sequences.
"We propose an unprecedented level of computer modeling," the IBM/Scripps proposal reads.
The strategy is new, said Nick Tsinoremas, Scripps Florida's director of informatics. Normally, drugs to fight a flu virus are modified each year ahead of the flu season, with scientists trying to predict how the pathogen might change from the previous year.
"It's a very reactive way," Tsinoremas said. "We're more proactive."
In Phase 1 of Checkmate, which runs through next year, the first four racks of IBM's latest Blue Gene supercomputer will be installed at the company's Boca Raton site on Congress Avenue. Each rack consists of a dark computer box with a terabyte of memory and 2,000 microprocessors.
During this phase, as IBM builds up computer muscle, Scripps scientists will search for viral mutations of the bird flu that escape the body's immune system.
"To understand the current virus, we have to understand how it mutated through the years," Tsinoremas said.
In 2008, Phase 2 expands computer capacity to 22 computer racks. With the greater computer power, IBM and Scripps scientists will try to predict how the virus will mutate in the future and identify compounds and antibodies to combat those future changes.
"We'll need a lot more computing power to predict which strains will be lethal," Tsinoremas said.
Phase 3 represents the final three years of research, followed by drug production.
In this phase, Blue Gene grows to 84 racks with 168,000 processors and eclipses the largest Blue Gene, which is now in use at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Scientists then will develop therapeutics and begin testing them in animals.
"This is where the major discovery will occur," Tsinoremas said.
posted by Nancy Moreno @ 11:02 AM
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