Roadrunner supercomputer maps HIV family tree
Researchers are using IBM's Roadrunner to analyze tens of thousands of genetic sequences from individuals with HIV.
(Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Physicist Tanmoy Bhattacharya and HIV researcher Bette Korber are creating an evolutionary genetic family tree based on samples taken by the international Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology consortium, in order to compare the evolutionary history of more than 10,000 sequences from more than 400 people with HIV.
If they can identify common features of the virus as it is transmitted, researchers might be able to create a vaccine that recognizes the virus before the body's immune system reacts to--and mutates--it.
What already sounds like a lot of data, however, could balloon further, hence the importance of Roadrunner. "We are at the cusp of being able to obtain more than 100,000 viral sequences from a single person," Korber said. "For this new kind data to be useful, computational advances will have to keep pace."
Roadrunner, developed by IBM for the Department of Energy (and occupying about 6,000 square feet at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico), first broke the petaflop barrier (which means it performed more than one million billion calculations per second) in May 2008. It may soon be known for helping develop a "specially designed" HIV vaccine, Bhattacharya says:
The petascale supercomputer gives us the capacity to look for similarities across whole populations of acute patients. At this scale we can begin to figure out the relationships between chronic and acute infections using statistics to determine the interconnecting branches--and it is these interconnections where a specially-designed vaccine might be most effective.
In addition to helping map the HIV genetic tree, Roadrunner has also recently simulated the Big Bang in an attempt to better understand dark matter, calculating the physics behind 64 billion proto-galaxies, each about the size of a billion of our suns. Once it crunched those numbers (all in a day's work, right?), Roadrunner's results predicted five times more dark matter than astronomers have thus far observed.
Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
Voting rights start at age 15. You get one 'vote unit' at that age. Each five years of age after that, your 'vote unit' goes up by one, until age 40, where your 'vote unit' reaches its maximum, six. Your 'vote uint' remains six until age 59, Starting at age 60 and each five years after that, your 'vote unit' decreases by one. At age 85, your 'vote unit' drops to zero. This reflects the importance of experience and knowledge as well as the importance of having buy in toward future effects.
Also, for all seats in Congress:
a mandatory retirement age of 65.
no pension, although they would get a 401K account with limited matching of fund contributions.
they would have to contribute to health care purchased on the open market at the group rate.
COBRA for eighteen months after leaving office with full payment toward the Congress group rate.
Eventually we might want to see mandatory term limits on the national level. Five terms for the House and three terms for the Senate. If you cannot achieve your legislative goals in ten years of service in the House or fifteen in the Senate (the Senate moves slower, by design), then you are not very affective, time to leave. Limits that are tighter than that do not recognize the reality of governance. Limits longer than that do not recognize the reality of corruption.
Of course, these are all opinions. My opinions. Not fact. Please do not confuse opinion with fact. Oh wait... I forgot where I was.
Cheers.
My thought on term limits is to run only one term at a time. No consecutive terms. I believe that this will really hurt the lobbyists. Also gets the politicians back into the world for a while.
- by caine-mac October 29, 2009 5:43 PM PDT
- Scientist have already discovered areas of HIV that must remain unchanged in order for the particle to remain infective [ie. dangerous]. This computer should be used for protein/ligand docking to digitally expose the models of HIV variants to every chemical currently known to us AND to theoretically synthesise new ones.
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(7 Comments)gene Therapy will crack HIV in the next 10-15years and [all forms of] cancer will follow soon after.
Thank god for technology.