Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling (ICM) at University of Warsaw in Poland, has selected IBM Blue Gene/Q, a single architecture supercomputer, to support the country's biomedical and biotechnological research initiative, Centre for Pre-clinical Research and Technology (CePT).
The supercomputer and its supporting e-infrastructure will help over 500 life sciences and biomedical researchers, physicians and students from a consortium to gain further insights into chronic diseases and develop a new drug.
University of Warsaw CePT director Dr. Robert Sot said that the CePT, a €100m project, aims to support Poland's transition towards more preventive and patient-centric healthcare.
"The project will allow the medical community to provide a more holistic approach and open collaboration for the development of innovative treatments and drugs that will improve patients' quality of life over the long term," Sot added.
The new BlueGene/Q, code named Nostromo, will also help scientists process up to 16 tera bytes of Big Data per sequence by running compute-intensive simulations at the speed of 209.7Tn operations per second.
ICM director prof. Marek Niezgódka said that the process of developing and generating a new drug or treatment normally takes up to three years, and costs have nearly quadrupled in the past 15 years.
"With Nostromo, we expect to increase the simulation speed which will bring us much closer to the era of "personalized medicine," when preventative approaches can be tailored to a specific condition," Niezgódka added.
The consortium, which is led by The Medical University of Warsaw (WUM), consists of three universities and seven research centers of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
