With Halloween Around the Corner, Super Computers are getting "Brainy"

Just when you thought supercomputer technology yielded the optimum performance, a new project arises that is literally mind blowing. An article by CNN highlights the Human Brain Project, a billion-dollar plan to replicate the human brain inside a supercomputer.

What sounds like a science-fiction movie coming true, is actually a project geared toward curing conditions like depression, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. This project may change the methods of medical imaging for those conditions because it attempts to simulate the tangles of neurons and synapses that power high-functioning thoughts, like moving and reasoning.

The Human Brain Project is piggy-backing off a project in Switzerland that studied tiny slivers of rodent gray matter and fed a computer with huge amounts of data and algorithms. Now that breakthroughs have been made in predicting thought, there is a need for more funding and supercomputers to expand the project.

The bold claims of the project have dubbed the scientists as "Team Frankenstein" and their computer as "Skynet," the artificial intelligence that unleashed a robot war upon Earth in the "Terminator" films.

Sean Hill, the neuroscientist on the project laughs at the comparisons and says that the supercomputer will mostly be used for educational purposes and it will allow scientists to conduct experiments without the need of probing in human skulls.

To read more about the project, check out the CNN article here.

Go Pink this October with Cancer-Analyzing Super Computers

NantHealth, a health IT company has teamed with AT&T, HP Intel and Verizon to create a supercomputer, similar to the Powerserve Quatro, that will reduce the time required to analyze genomic data of a patient with cancer. What would have normally taken eight weeks, now takes a mere 47 seconds.

Doctors have been unable to guide cancer treatment using genomic sequencing in the past because of the amount of time it took. This spurred a need for a solution. Teaming with several organizations, a high-speed, super-computer fiber network was created. This fiber network will provide thousands of oncology practitioners with information to fight cancer in a shorter amount of time.

It was reported that the ultimate storage solution helped the company to collect 96,512GB of data for over 3,000 patients and transfer it in under 70 hours. Mathematically, 5,000 patients could be analyzed per day with the technology.

So be sure to wear your pink with pride this October as it is Breast Cancer Month and spread the hope and the news about this new technological breakthrough in cancer treatment. To read more about NantHealth and the new technology, click here.

Mira, Mira on the Wall, What happened during the Big Bang?

An article recently appeared regarding a new super computer that will run the most complex universe simulation ever attempted –the epitome of a virtual machine. The supercomputer, Mira, is due to describe the origin, evolution, and structure of the 13-billion-year existence of the universe in about 2 weeks. The computation will begin in October, piggy-backing on other sky-mapping projects that provided a vast amount of knowledge on the structure of the current universe.

The challenge plaguing cosmologists throughout history is figuring out exactly what occurred in the first nascent galaxies. In order to explore the beginning, they have to build a new universe. They have crafted mathematical narratives that explain why some of the galaxies flew apart from one another while others clusters into what we see around us today. Mira's trillions-of-particles simulation will cram over 12 billion years worth of space evolution into just two weeks. Can you imagine the size of that cloud storage data center?

By the end of the two weeks, cosmologists hope that the final product will resemble what we see in the current universe mappings. With the technological advances, the supercomputers in the late 2010s are due to be a thousand times more powerful than Mira. These virtual universes will serve as testing grounds for some of the most sophisticated ideas about the cosmos ever.

To read more of the article on Mira by The Atlantic, click here.