Grid project to help cancer research

Cancer researchers are using grid computing to access supercomputing power levels that will enable them to examine thousands of tissue samples.

The IBM-run World Community Grid uses donated processing power from more than 200,000 linked computers to perform for humanitarian projects calculations normally carried out by high-performance computer systems.

The Help Defeat Cancer project is a joint venture by the UK’s Macmillan Cancer Support charity and a number of US research organisations.

Macmillan chief executive Peter Cardy says that the grid will provide scientists with supercomputing level processing power for the first time.

‘Supercomputing is such an expensive business that if we can find ways of doing it much more cheaply then we have to take the opportunity,’ he said.

The grid will allow the project to perform as many calculations in one day as would take an ordinary computer 130 years.

The grid acts as a filter for correlating cancer protein expressions with the different stages of disease progression and different types of tumour.

Dr David Foran, a lead researcher at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in the US, says the project will identify patterns in the proteins much quicker than a human could.

‘The information produced is important for understanding cancer biology to understanding the underlying mechanisms of disease,’ said Foran.

‘It could enable a physician to lace a patient into a specific therapy, so if Mrs Jones has this expression pattern and we know from the library that she will not respond to treatment one, she might respond to treatment C,’ he said.

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Further Reading:

• Home PCs in Aids grid project
• Sport Relief gears up with grid
• Thales puts IT on the grid

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