Memphis, TN – While supercomputers at hospitals and other healthcare facilities are still uncommon, more and more hospital CIOs, doctors and researchers around the country are eyeing the possibility of adding computing horsepower to their own facilities, says Clayton Naeve, chief research information officer at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. and director of the St. Jude Hartwell Center for Bioinformatics and Biotechnology.
St. Jude and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston made the most recent list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. Experts from the University of Mannheim, Germany, the University of Tennessee, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory compile the list.
St. Jude's IBM computer - the equivalent of 280 servers working at once - ranks 251st and can perform more than 600 billion operations per second. The University of Texas' computer - 180 computers linked together with a central storage system - ranked 260.
"St. Jude is now in the same arena as major computer centers operated by governments, major corporations, communications corporations and physics research centers around the world," Naeve said.
Naeve expects other healthcare facilities to join St. Jude among the computing elite. He meets every six months with about 50 of his counterparts, biomedical researchers around the country, from facilities such as Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and the Fred Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle. Everyone is looking for the added speed and power that supercomputers afford, he said. "They're all leaning that way. There's just no question that with large amounts of data, this is the way to go."
A computation that in the past might have taken 11 days to complete can now be done in three hours, Naeve said. Though he cannot pinpoint numbers, IBM Worldwide Solutions Executive Peter Morrissey says Naeve is right about the trend toward hospitals migrating to faster, more powerful computers, and it's driven by a new wealth of genomic data. No longer are hospital computers built solely for financial analysts, Morrissey noted. "There's a strong desire to bring research to the bedside," he said.
Hospitals are working with genetic expressions, and high performance computing is enabling them to pull their clinical and genetic data together, Morrissey said. In some cases it is helping doctors determine whether a particular medication or course of treatment will work before administering it to a patient who might have a violent reaction, he said.
"Supercomputers are especially effective at computational modeling," said Jiejie Zhang, associate professor at the School of Health Information Services at the University of Texas. At UT, researchers use the computer for modeling 3-D molecular structures.
Supercomputers can cut R&D time and expense, says Zhang. Clinical trials can be accomplished more quickly and at a fraction of the cost because computers allow simulation to replace trials that once required animals or humans. "We try simulation first and save a lot of money," Zhang said.
