Meet Mendel, the Hospital for Sick Kids’ (HSC) supercomputer. It generates so much heat that a 10-ton air conditioning unit is needed to maintain it a constant room temperature, yet its number-crunching powers are essential to scientists in the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. The former uses the awesome computing power to simulate the biological processes taking place inside cells. The latter discipline uses the tools of mathematics and statistics to analyze databases of long sequences of DNA.
A supercomputer is a machine that channels all its resources into executing programs as fast as possible. A cluster is comprised of several machines called nodes, which share common disk storage. At the HSC, the Silicon Graphics supercomputer has 192 processors, 178 GB of memory and 3 trillion bytes of disk space. Supercomputers and clusters are used for research that requires many repetitive mathematical calculations.
Dr. John Parkinson, a researcher at the HSC, uses the supercomputer for his research in comparative genomics. His research group has developed a database of partial genomic sequences of organisms whose full sequences are currently unavailable.
The database allows scientists to access and extract valuable biological information from sequences of parasites, in the hope of developing new drugs or vaccines.
Another HSC researcher, Dr. Régis Pomès, uses the supercomputer to study biological processes, such as how ions travel across cell membranes. His research group applies simulation techniques to model the molecular processes on the computer.
With their mammoth number-crunching ability, supercomputers can tackle the most complex of problems. But even then, the answer usually takes some time.
