HPC & Bioinformatics

Chair:

Prof. Dr. Matthias Rarey, Managing Director of the Center for Bioinformatics, University of Hamburg, Germany

There is no good reason to build a supercomputer except an application asking for its performance. Modern life science research gathers huge amounts of data waiting for interpretation. In the past 15 years, the genomes of more than 180 organisms have been sequenced, the structures of more than 55.000 biological macromolecules have been resolved, and lots of information from protein expression to molecular interactions has been collected. Based on this data, every day scientists around the world draw a more complete picture of the mechanisms of life. Not surprisingly, life science research is a key motivator for high performance computing as can be seen with IBM’s Blue Gene project.

In the HPC & Bioinformatics Session, the need and relevance of HPC in the life sciences will be exemplarily shown in two different fields of Bioinformatics. Prof. Seoighe from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, will report on how to predict the behavior of HIV-1 virus in a responding immune system. A better understanding of the interplay between the virus and the immune system is of importance for the development of HIV therapies. High-performance computing can be applied in order to predict the genomic sequence evolution. In the second presentation, Prof. Grubmüller from the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany, will cover the field of computing in structural biology. A fundamental understanding of biological functions is only possible via the complex three-dimensional structure of the involved macromolecules. With several state-of-the-art examples the talk will highlight the pivotal role of large-scale computer simulations in this field.

The aim of this session at ISC is to address the interests of life and computer scientists. It is well suited for computer scientists and HPC system manufacturers interested in today’s HPC requirements in life sciences as well as for life scientists interested in today’s options for HPC. The session is open to everybody interested in getting an impressive demonstration of how HPC influences and – in some cases – drives life science research today.