Miles Nosler, Student, Texas State University

By Miles Nosler

Over the last few years, whenever I saw an IBM Smarter Planet commercial on television I wondered what was behind things like Smarter Transportation? Smarter Cities? Smarter Commerce?

Since then I’ve come to understand what the Smarter Planet concept is about – tackling Big issues with smarter, interconnected technologies to improve the way we live and work. But, it didn’t truly sink in until I started crunching some Big Data with an IBM mainframe. Let me explain. 

If someone told me I would take the top spot among 4,600 very smart students competing in IBM’s Master the Mainframe contest, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s exactly what I did, and now I have in-demand technical skills on my resume that are landing me job interviews. 

Miles Nosler with IBM ‘Master the Mainframe’ Award.

I first heard about the contest in 2011 at Texas State University where I’ve been taking evening classes to complete my Computer Science degree while working full time as a software engineer.

The contest rules specified that no previous mainframe experience was necessary, so I signed up and actually did better than I anticipated, earning an honorable mention in the competition. I was immediately hooked on the raw computing power of the mainframe and its ability to crunch massive amounts of Big Data.

The contest is open to high school and college students across North America (and in dozens of countries worldwide) and is run in three parts with each designed to get progressively harder.

The first part introduces students to the mainframe and gets them comfortable accessing it remotely. The second introduces advanced commands and system setup techniques, and the third part has students applying these skills to solve a real world business problem.

When IBM announced the 2012 contest, I jumped at the chance to compete so I could add more mainframe experience to my resume. I worked hard to be one of the first 2,500 students to get a 100 percent score on part one, and advance to the second part where I was one of the first 60 contestants to get a perfect score. 

The third and final part was the toughest and most exciting. I had to apply my new skills in a real world scenario where a bank migrates Big Data to a new mainframe while keeping its doors and Web site open to customers.

What impressed me most on the final part was the mainframe’s ability to effortlessly crunch this data and get it where it needed to be inside the business. That way, the bank could offer more personalized products and services based on what customers were telling them. Aha! Smarter Banking!

It had taken me weeks to solve this challenge, and I earned the top spot among all of the competing students to get it 100 percent right.

As the first place winner, I won cool prizes including a tablet computer and an all-expense paid trip to IBM Poughkeepsie where they make mainframes.

I posted my freshly-minted resume on IBM’s System z job board and immediately caught the attention of two potential employers looking for candidates with mainframe and Big Data skills. I’ve had two successful interviews so far and expect job offers will soon follow.

The experience I gained competing in IBM’s Master the Mainframe contest provided me with marketable IT skills in a hot job market. I can even tell an employer what Smarter Banking means.

I encourage all high school and college students to participate in next year’s contest. No experience necessary. Check out the official Facebook page for updates.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, IBM Master the Mainframe, IBM Smarter Financing, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Texas State University, Watson

Matthias Kaiserswerth, Director, IBM Research, Zurich

By Matthias Kaiserswerth

Steve Jobs famously lured John Sculley from a soda pop company to Apple in 1983 by saying, “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?” In today’s business environment, the comparable challenge to a young engineer or computer scientist would be: “Do you want to create the next mobile app that makes your friends look like zombies or do you want to help transform the world of computing?”

That, in fact, is the challenge that we’re issuing today. IBM and ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, have assembled what some call a dream team of scientists to create a next-generation computing system capable of handling the ultimate big data challenge. Our project, called DOME, is a system for handling the deluge of data that will be created by the Square Kilometre Array, a radio telescope made up of more than half a million individual antennas that are to be scattered across southern Africa and Australia. When the SKA is completed in 2024, it is expected to process 14 exabytes of raw data per day. The data collected by the SKA in a single day would take nearly two million years to play back on an iPod.

We’re in the process of recruiting more than a half-dozen PhD.-level students to help staff the project–and we’re staging a virtual job fair to engage prospective employees. If you’re interested and qualified, visit the job fair Web site on March 26 at 5 p.m. Central European Time (Noon US Eastern Time). Only top students with huge ambitions should apply.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s so special about DOME and SKA? Because the telescope is to be made from so many individual antennas, the antennas are to be so widely scattered, and such a large volume of data is being gathered, a novel computing system must be developed to manage the process of gathering, storing and analyzing data from end to end. The system must have computing power that is many times that of today’s fastest computers. It must take up much less space in data centers and use much less electrical power than today’s most efficient systems. And the system will have to learn and adapt as it interacts with data.

IBM has a vision of the future of computing that we call the era of cognitive systems. We believe that this new era of computing will be as distinct from the current era, that of programmable computers, as this one was from the one that preceded it, the tabulating era. Increasingly, because of the emergence of big data, we will need computers that can learn and adapt–thinking machines rather than machines that wait passively for human commands. The SKA is not only the ultimate big data challenge; it also lights the path towards cognitive computing. Most of the fundamental scientific and engineering advances that will be required to fulfill the promise of cognitive computing will also be required to handle the huge demands posed by the SKA. Ultimately, these advances will transform business, government and our personal lives, helping us make better decisions, which, in turn, will make the world work better.

Breakthroughs targeted by the DOME team range data storage and networking to supercomputing and data analytics. We’re even creating a computer program that will help the designers choose the optimal technologies and architectures for DOME. Think of it as an intelligent design system.

There are plenty of projects for bright young computer scientists to work on these days, but it is hard to imagine other ones with the potential of rewriting the rules of computing, like DOME does. So, if you want to change the world, please look at what we’re doing.

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For more information about the SKA and DOME, read this white paper.

Technorati Tags: ASTRON, DOME, IBM, SKA, Square Kilometre Array

John Kelly, Senior Vice President and Director, IBM Research

By John Kelly

A few weeks ago, I shared a dinner table in Johannesburg with Adrian Tiplady, one of the managers of Square Kilometre Array South Africa, which is managing the country’s involvement in the Square Kilometre Array astronomy project. The SKA is one of the most ambitious science efforts ever launched. The goal of the 10 countries involved is to decipher radio waves from deep space in order to solve the riddles of the universe and the nature of matter. Yet something Adrian told me totally blew my mind: he said the computing challenges posed by the SKA are just as great as those related to astronomy.

It’s gratifying when scientists from other domains come together to push computing and computer science forward. And it’s even more gratifying when organizations like Tiplady’s form partnerships with IBM to bring cutting-edge technologies to bear on the most demanding tasks ever dreamed up by humans. Today, SKA South Africa announced that it has joined IBM and ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, in a multi-year public-private partnership funded primarily by the Dutch government aimed at developing an information technology system for harvesting insights from the SKA’s data.

The SKA’s more than 500,000 antennas scattered across southern Africa and Australia will produce a torrent of data that’s equivalent to 10 times the daily global Internet traffic. Yet today’s state-of-the-art computer technologies simply aren’t up to the task of gathering, processing and making sense of so much information in real time. So I believe that SKA represents the ultimate big data challenge, and that the technology we develop for handing its data will provide a foundation for the next era of computing, which we at IBM call the era of cognitive systems.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM has placed multiple bets on the SKA. We’re working with ASTRON and South Africa on the DOME project, the effort we launched with ASTRON last year to develop technologies that we believe will be crucial to managing the SKA’s data. ASTRON is already using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to process the data produced by LOFAR, a precursor to the SKA radio telescope. Meanwhile, in Australia and New Zealand, IBM has provided supercomputers for use by university researchers who are analyzing data from the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in the Australian outback—another precursor to the SKA. Working with those scientists, a team of IBM software programmers has created a prototype system for collecting and searching the large amounts of data collected by the SKA.

Bradley Frank, Prof. Erwin de Blok and Moses Mogotsi doing SKA research at the University of Capetown. Photo credit: Katherine Traut

Far beyond the SKA, I believe that advances we and our partners make will be useful in a wide range of computing applications—everything from core scientific research to analysis of business data across a range of industries, including health care, banking and telecommunications.

Remember Watson, the IBM computer that beat two past-champions at the TV quiz show Jeopardy two years ago? The work we’re doing for the SKA will enable computer scientists to develop cognitive computing system that will help us penetrate the incredible complexity of data that is sensory, noisy and vast. Like Watson, it will learn and reason—helping human experts to see the world more clearly and make better decisions. The SKA work truly is one of the first major forays into a new era of computing.

——

Read the white paper, The Square Kilometre Array: The Ultimate Big Data Challenge.

On March 26 at 17:00 Central European Time, the IBM Diversity Recruiting team invites professors, scientists and university students to participate in a virtual recruiting event for several open positions on the DOME project.

Technorati Tags: ASTRON, DOME, IBM, Square Kilometer Array

Dr. Lora Ramunno, Canada Research Chair in Computational Nanophotonics and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa

By Dr. Lora Ramunno

The study of the interaction between light and matter on the nanoscale (a nanometre is about one billionth of a metre) is revolutionizing many areas of science and technology. Powerful applications can be designed, for example, to capture real time images of live cells, tissues and biological processes or to help manufacture extremely small devices that can be used in diverse areas including telecommunications, computation and biotechnology.

These applications hold the potential to significantly improve early detection of disease or provide a better understanding of biological processes at a cellular level, as well as to identify hidden insights that can help companies move into newer and smarter manufacturing in the high technology market.

Through our research project at the University of Ottawa, which is graciously supported by the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP), we hope to take this technology to the next level. Our team will be capitalizing on the power of Canada’s most powerful computing platform, the Blue Gene/Q, created by IBM and housed at the University of Toronto.

As someone who studies how light interacts with matter on an incredibly small scale, I need power! That is high performance computing power. And, since we study very complex and extremely small nanoscale systems, our applications require a much larger area to simulate their interaction with light. This creates large simulations that generate Big Data — large data sets that must then be analyzed to extract useful scientific information.

The ability to create models of this type of device has been limited by the amount of computer power and the software available until now. My group, in collaboration with University Research Chair in Surface Plasmon Photonics, Pierre Berini, has developed a powerful nanophotonics computational software suite with many capabilities not found in commercial software. The Blue Gene/Q will allow us to apply our computational programs, which can carry out the intensive Big Data calculations that are critical to simulating nanoscale imaging and nanophotonic device applications.

This powerful imaging technology will be useful in healthcare where access to detailed images — say of live cells and tissues — can help understand biological processes underlying disease and lead to better treatments.

The SOSCIP is a consortium made up of IBM, the government of Ontario and seven Ontario universities, including University of Ottawa, whose objective is to make a combination of high performance computing devices available to academia and industry for research and development.  IBM and the government of Ontario are investing $210 million to fund facilities for high performance, agile and cloud computing.

Through SOSCIP, the Ontario government wants to improve the province’s competitive advantage in key areas, including infrastructure, health, agile computing, water conservation and management, and energy consumption and management.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, cloud computing, IBM Blue Gene/Q, IBM Research, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, university, University of Toronto

Dr. James Hendler, Professor and Computer Science Department Head, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

By Dr. James Hendler

Every single student in the Department of Computer Science here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has the potential to revolutionize computing. But with the arrival of Watson at Rensselaer, they’re even better positioned to do so.

Watson has caused the researchers in my field of artificial intelligence (AI) to rethink some of our basic assumptions. Watson’s cognitive computing is a breakthrough technology, and it’s really amazing to be here at Rensselaer, where we will be the first university to get our hands on this amazing system.

With 90 percent of the world’s data generated in the past two years, the ability for people and even traditional computing systems to make sense of this data has grown complex. The addition of Watson to our campus is very timely considering the growth of what some have termed “Big Data.” 

In 1976, Joseph Weizenbaum, a leading computer scientist, wrote a book called Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation, in which he criticized the field of AI for trying to replace human creativity and thought with the power of computers.  He suggested that humans and computers were inherently different, and that trying to get computers to think like humans was an insurmountable task, if it was possible at all. 

I first met Weizenbaum when I was still a college student, and the arguments he made about the difference in the way humans and computer “thought” has influenced me throughout my career.  It always seemed to me that the combination of computers and people was the unbeatable one, where our creativity would be amplified by the computer’s power.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Weizenbaum died in 2008, so he wasn’t around to see Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at Jeopardy! in February 2011.  If he was, I think he would have been stunned to see just what a computer could do. But in playing with Watson in the time since the game, I realized that when people see Jeopardy! questions and also see Watson’s proposed answers, they can almost always figure out which one is right. While Watson gets many more of the answers than most people, it doesn’t get all of them. 

Together, though, it is clear that the human and computer can outperform what can be done by either of them alone. Weizenbaum would be sure to point this out, and I think he would also have reminded us that the documents that power Watson—whether famous novel or a page from Wikipedia—were all authored by humans. Watson processes documents in astounding ways, but it still takes us to produce them in the first place.

What we see, given this perspective, is that Watson ushers in the era of “cognitive computing.” It’s an era in which a machine is able to process documents and data in new ways and allow us to significantly amplify the capabilities of what humans can achieve.  Whether in health care, finance or other domains, Watson will allow us to explore what machines and humans can do together, when the computer functions more as a partner, than just as a calculator.  This is clearly a key part of the future of computing, and I think it is great that some of our students will be able to have hands-on experience with this incredible machine.

As the Head of the Computer Science Department, I can tell you that it is not just the machine that is incredible, but also our students. From freshman to doctoral candidates, the innovations that these young women and men produce are amazing. A very large percentage of our students get involved in research as undergraduates, and those of us who teach them are responsible for seeing that they are doing new and novel work. Here at Rensselaerwe have a nearly two-century-old tradition of giving our students access to the best technologies and tools that exist. I am very proud to be a part of our university’s partnership with IBM, which will help us continue this tradition.

I don’t know what Professor Weizenbaum would say if he was here with us today. I think he would be sure to stress the importance of the human brain in the partnership with any computer, even one this capable. But I think that amplifying the creativity of our students with the sheer power of Watson is going to allow us to do some amazing things. I’m excited to be in at the start of something that will help us answer the call of the Rensselaer motto, “Why Not Change the World?”

Technorati Tags: cloud, cognitive computing, IBM Smarter Planet, ibm watson, innovation, Watson

Dr. Tom Corr, President and CEO, Ontario Centres of Excellence

By Dr. Tom Corr

High performance computing was once the domain of big corporations, governments and universities. But not anymore. Global economic pressures to innovate and compete are intense, and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs or SMEs), recognized as economic powerhouses around the world are being ushered into the world of big data.

Thanks to an innovative and unprecedented partnership between Ontario Centres of Excellence, IBM, seven Ontario Universities, the Province of Ontario and FedDev, high performance computing (HPC) resources and technical expertise are now available to small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME) in Southern Ontario – businesses that are looking to expand their research capabilities.

Today we are pleased to announce that an additional 31 research projects have been added to this portfolio, enabling more than 20 Ontario SMEs to participate in this truly advantageous partnership.

Access to HPC technology for research purposes has typically been outside the reach of many small businesses. While Canada has developed some world-class computing infrastructures, HPC resources for small businesses in Southern Ontario have been nonexistent. Now, companies chosen to participate in what is called the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP) will have access to leading Canadian academic research talent, as well as an HPC platform that includes IBM’s Blue Gene/Q system, recently proclaimed the fastest supercomputer in Canada, a state-of-the-art Cloud and Analytics platform, and an Agile computing infrastructure. All projects will also have access to technical support personnel.

The only limit on the potential benefits associated with tapping into HPC resources is a company’s imagination. The IBM-led research partnership model aims to develop a supercomputing “ecosystem” that supports business; gives them access to world-class researchers and a research infrastructure; and the opportunity to conduct R&D in a supportive environment. As simulation and modeling replaces the need to construct prototypes, the cost savings and pace of development for the manufacturing sector alone easily supports the business case for investing in HPC.

OCE has a special role to play in making small and medium-sized businesses aware of the opportunity presented by the IBM-led HPC partnership. We need to explore how businesses can use big data to create value and gain the know-how and technical support needed to succeed. Starting early this year, we will begin hosting a series of information sessions in key cities across the province to educate SMBs about high performance computing and how it can help make them more competitive.

The effort is in keeping with our mission to help advance the province’s innovation agenda through the production of breakthrough products and services that put us at the top of national and global markets. And it starts with empowering SMEs with advanced research capabilities.

Technorati Tags: Blue Gene/Q, HPC, IBM Smarter Planet, Small businesses, SMB, Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform, supercomputer, supercomputing

The Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State, Canada

By Hon. Gary Goodyear

Southern Ontario is a diverse region, containing some of Canada’s largest urban centres surrounded by vibrant rural communities and bordered by one of the world’s largest economies. From our technology triangle to golden horseshoe, from manufacturing heartland to transport corridor, Canada’s most populous region is home to a dynamic business sector and world-class post-secondary and research institutions.

So, when our government was approached by the University of Toronto and Western University, as well as five other post-secondary institutions, to establish a research and commercialization partnership designed to answer some of the world’s most complex issues, we listened to what they had to say.

The premise was simple: the answers to so many of our current problems, like traffic congestion, energy consumption and complex diseases, are buried in the vast troves of data that researchers are busy collecting, storing and analyzing. The idea was to figure out how to speed up the process in a game-changing way: and from this came the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

As we all know, behind every good idea, you’ll find an even better computer. The consortium of post-secondary institutions knew that to tackle problems this big, they had to bring in a lead industry partner that had the expertise to help them create one of world’s most powerful supercomputing facilities. Enter IBM. The consortium’s sophisticated, cutting-edge system is now online and made up of a new high performance IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at the University of Toronto. This system is also supported by cloud and agile computing platforms at Western University. And today, this system can be proudly called Canada’s most powerful supercomputing platform.

Researchers are preparing to use this powerful technology to do some amazing things, like analyzing brain activity in near real time using MRI data and streaming analytics. They are also creating tools to give consumers critical feedback on how to be more energy efficient and connecting urban teaching hospitals with clinics in rural and remote communities. Thanks to the efforts of the many people connected to this platform, these great ideas, and many others, will some day be propelled into world markets by our businesses, right here, in southern Ontario.

The Harper government recognizes that innovation is the way of the future. It’s how we’ll provide jobs for our kids, it’s how we’ll continue to make significant contributions to medical and technological breakthroughs, and it’s how businesses in southern Ontario will be able to grow. But, it’s only through the power of partnerships, leveraging the investments of government and industry and combining them with the practical know-how of business and the vast potential of our educational institutions, that we’ll get the best possible return on our investment when it comes to research and development.

The Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform, backed by the best supercomputing platform in the country, promises to pay dividends well into the future for our communities and others around the world.

Technorati Tags: Blue Gene/Q, IBM, IBM Canada, IBM Smarter Planet, Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform

David Turek, Vice President, IBM Exascale Computing

By David Turek 

A major challenge in cardiology is to predict who will die suddenly from ventricular arrhythmias – the most common cause of sudden cardiac death, which itself is the largest cause of natural death in the U.S.

Despite years of intense medical research, likely victims are hard to predict and even if identified, there are not effective and low-cost therapies available.

Mathematical models have the potential to provide insight into the mechanics of arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death, but we’ve never had the computational power necessary to make a model run even close to the speed of a real beating heart. Instead, researchers have been forced to work at low resolution, settle for short run times of – at most – a few beats, or take hours for a single heart beat.

Enter Sequoia, an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer built on the IBM POWER Architecture at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The 16+ petaflop system, #2 on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers announced today is currently being used to run a code called Cardioid, which was created by IBM and LLNL researchers to realistically model a beating human heart at high resolution.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For the first time, fully detailed whole heart models can be run quickly enough to examine how potentially fatal arrhythmias develop and are influenced by individual genetic variations, the administration of drugs and the use of medical devices. The IBM, LLNL team envisions this capability could eventually be widely adopted by medical centers, pharmaceutical companies and medical device firms, helping them to study and better understand the mechanisms that can lead to heart ailments.

For example, an initial modeling study investigated a class of drugs designed to prevent arrhythmia, but later produced greater mortality in some patient populations. Drugs targeting many diseases have the unfortunate side effect of increasing arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death. Understanding the risk of arrhythmias remains a challenge for the both pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory agencies because the danger may only be revealed after a drug is administered across a large and diverse patient population.

The Cardioid simulation work has been named as a finalist in the 2012 Gordon Bell Prize competition, which annually recognizes the most important advances in HPC applications and will announce this year’s winner on Thursday.

Other notable IBM systems on the TOP500 listinclude the fastest supercomputer inEurope, the POWER Architecture-based Blue Gene/Q system “JUQUEEN” at the German research center Forschungszentrum Juelich, which will be made available to scientists via a peer review process for projects ranging from biophysics to plasma physics.

The fastest system inCanadais also a Blue Gene/Q. It will be applied toward, among other things, such projects as brain research, assessing how climate change impacts watershed and better predicting consumers’ energy needs. It will be used to help make significant contributions to scientific breakthroughs and also help small and medium-sized enterprises in Ontario speed product research and development.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Yellowstone supercomputer, debuting on the TOP500 at #13, last month began supporting initial scientific projects on a wide range of Earth science topics that will improve predictions of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, fires and other natural hazards.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For all of these organizations, it’s important that research is completed with energy efficient, highly-utilized systems to lower costs, especially those that use public funding. Beyond the immediate economic challenges of unused assets and higher energy bills, also at stake is the long term ability of clients to innovate and grow. Of more than 300 global businesses surveyed by IBM and IDC, only 21 percent were operating highly efficient data centers, but those companies are able to spend 50 percent more on business innovation and growth.

Sequoia is 91 percent water cooled and 9 percent air cooled. This allows the system to achieve more performance, while simultaneously consuming less electricity. IBM Blue Gene/Q systems account for 25 of the 30 most energy efficient systems on the TOP500 list. Today, one of the fastest computers in the world is also one of the most energy efficient.

Technorati Tags: Blue Gene/Q, Gordon Bell, human heart modeling, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Power Architecture, Sequoia, Smarter Planet, Top500

Ruhong Zhou, Ph.D., conducts groundbreaking avian flu research on IBM Blue Gene

The next time an avian flu scare strikes — as it did in 2004 and likely will again — the world may be better prepared thanks to the work of Ruhong Zhou, research staff scientist and manager of the Soft Matter Theory and Simulation Group at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Zhou and his team have been using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to anticipate genetic changes in the H5N1 influenza virus (commonly known as avian or bird flu) that might pose a serious threat to human health. Although H5N1 rarely infects the human population, when it does it has an extremely high mortality rate.

In a recent breakthrough, Zhou was able to computationally identify the single mutation in H5N1 that, should it occur, would debilitate antibodies in our immune system from fighting off this deadly flu. Armed with this information, pharmaceutical companies could design a vaccine that would compensate for this mutation and allow people to develop the necessary antibodies to combat H5N1 if they contract it.

“By isolating and anticipating this mutation, we can be proactive in creating a vaccine before the next avian flu outbreak strikes — potentially saving lives and even helping prevent a global pandemic,” Zhou said.

Taking the guesswork out of vaccine design

Influenza can undergo various mutations over a short time period, so trying to predict exactly how a flu strain will mutate next is the first step in vaccine development. It is too costly and time-intensive, however, to do this type of upfront research by trial and error in a traditional lab setting, so Zhou uses computer simulations to do his work.

Blue Gene provides the computational power to rapidly and efficiently simulate mutations at the atomic level so scientists can now predict a mutation with great accuracy and take much of the guesswork out of vaccine design.

Zhou simulated over 100 single and double mutations of H5N1’s hemagglutinin (HA) protein on Blue Gene in order to pinpoint the single, antibody-suppressing mutation he sought. Using all of Blue Gene’s 8,000 processors, it took two days to model each mutation. By comparison, it would take 8,000 days — or 22 years — to run each model on a laptop or desktop computer with a dual CPU.

“We could have never done our research without Blue Gene,” said Zhou, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University, where he currently teaches graduate level courses. “High performance computing of this sort is enabling a new era of breakthroughs in life science and holds great promise for advances in personalized medicine as well.”

Avian flu is an ongoing threat and has the potential to erupt into a pandemic someday. Zhou's work will help the world be better prepared and potentially save lives.

A proactive approach to preventing pandemics

For Zhou, who recently published his findings in Biophysical Journal, this breakthrough is particularly meaningful because of the real promise it holds for public health.

“As scientists, we often do some basic research just for our own curiosity — and achieving the results is gratification enough,” Zhou said. “But this is not just for our own interest; this is something very, very important to human society.”

Along with his avian flu research, Zhou has been using Blue Gene for the past six years to model genetic variations and predict mutations in other influenza strains, including swine flu (H1N1) and Hong Kong flu (H3N2). Zhou hopes the ability to anticipate mutations will prompt the medical community to start preparing preemptive vaccines well ahead of flu outbreaks, rather than responding after the fact (and after lives have been lost), which is the usual practice.

“We need to move from a reactive model of vaccine development to a proactive one,” Zhou said. “Our ability to accurately predict what mutations will happen next should give pharmaceutical companies the confidence to invest in vaccine production early enough to mount a strong defense against a virus and prevent a pandemic.”

Partnerships with government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and with pharmaceutical companies that want to use Zhou’s research to guide vaccine design are essential to realizing the full potential of Zhou’s work.

“With the right funding model and partnerships we can continue to explore influenza strains as well as other infectious diseases, such as HIV,” Zhou said. “I firmly believe that together we can develop better vaccines that will have a profound impact on society’s health and well-being.”

Technorati Tags: avian flu, biomedicine, blue gene, H5N1, influenza, life sciences, pandemic, Ruhong Zhou, vaccine

By Lloyd Treinish, Senior Technical Staff Member, Chief Scientist – Deep Thunder, IBM

The dog days of summer are upon us, and while for some of us, that means more care-free days of fun in the sun, many of us associate the summer months with severe and sometimes unusual weather events.  These events pose increasing economic and societal impacts, and the  challenges can leave us wondering what other weather-related surprises could be around the corner.

According to a recent report released by NOAA, the 12-month period from July 2011 to June 2012 was the warmest on record for the contiguous United States (since record keeping began in 1895). To make matters worse, these blistering heat waves are expected to increase due to a changing climate. In a recent publication, a group of Stanford University scientists made the prediction that certain regions of the world could start to see “permanently” hotter summers in just a couple decades.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It is important to note that a warmer atmosphere contains more energy and can hold more moisture, which can lead to greater volatility and intensity of extreme weather events. Hence, it may be no coincidence that each day seems to bring a new headline about another weather-related disturbance. These events are to blame for countless fatalities and billions of dollars annually in property damage and loss.

Deep Thunder, IBM’s high resolution weather modeling technology, provides the granularity needed to improve preparedness. Using both historical and near real-time data, sophisticated analytics software and ever more powerful supercomputers, we can get extremely accurate weather forecasts and the impacts of severe events for specific locations (less than a mile) up to three days in advance.

Just recently, a rare type of severe windstorm for the eastern half of the US called a “derecho” blew through the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic areas. Not only was it unexpected by local authorities, it left millions to deal with sweltering temperatures without power or air conditioning.

Of course, such high temperatures over long periods have been linked to drought. For this year alone, that probably has an impact on the US economy of tens of billions of dollars. But such heat waves also have impact on the health of individuals and increase the likelihood of wildfires. So far in 2012, fires have burned about 2.4 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center and the outlook for the remainder of the summer is grim.

And while we haven’t been hit with any major hurricanes so far this year, we are just six weeks into a six-month long hurricane season. Only twice before since such records have been kept (1887 and 1908), have two tropical storms formed before the official start of the season on June 1. Further, 2012 is the first year that four named storms occurred by June 23. This is the highest level of tropical storm activity based upon strength and duration since 1968. Therefore, we could have some significant events later this season.

In an ideal world, we would be better prepared for the potential impact of extreme weather events. Traditional weather forecasts provide a look into broad weather patterns, but given the technology that is available to us today, we can do even better.

Deep Thunder can provide longer advance notice of adverse weather conditions, allowing more time for disaster prevention. Rather than monitor a storm, we can stage resources at the right place and time prior to an event to minimize the impact and save lives. For example, we could have provided a detailed, 18-hour warning for the derecho that impacted Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia late last month.

The practical applications for such specific and timely forecasts are nearly limitless. Detailed weather forecasts could help utilities better prepare for demands on the grid such as pockets of high load during a heat wave, and anticipate conditions that could result in power outages to proactively deploy repair crews. Fire fighters can anticipate the direction of a wild fire to prevent further spreading. Cities can plan more effective responses to heat waves to protect their citizens from extreme conditions such as loss of power or mitigate the impact of flooding. Highway patrols can even anticipate buildup and redirect traffic in the case of evacuations. In all of these cases, Deep Thunder uses an approach of coupled modeling, driven by advanced weather modeling focused on a specific area of importance and connected to sophisticated techniques, to predict and visualize the impacts of weather on business and citizens.

The weather affects much of our daily lives — everything from sports to produce prices — and although we don’t have the technology to change it, at the very least, we can better plan for it.

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