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In an unfinished building in downtown Toronto, along a plain, concrete hallway and through a black door marked only with a sign saying "Do Not Dust," the most powerful research supercomputer in Canada is trying to unlock the mysteries of cancer.
The new system, installed a few weeks ago and formally announced today, is analyzing millions of images of proteins in order to better identify cancer and to devise new, more effective treatments. The IBM supercomputer, a black box about the size of a large SUV with cooling fans that roar like jet engines, can run 12.5 trillion calculations per second.
"We can start making computations that we could not even think about before," says research leader Igor Jurisica of the Ontario Cancer Institute, who is working with scientists at Princess Margaret Hospital, the University Health Network and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo. "Calculations that would take months, we can do in days."
The $20-million supercomputer is busy working on several projects, all aimed at better understanding how cancer works in the human body and how to fight it. One project is analyzing the complicated ways in which proteins interact - a tangle of connections Dr. Jurisica describes as "a hairball" - trying to determine how, for example, the same type of cancer can act aggressively in one patient and slowly in another.
One of the computer's tasks is analyzing the vastly complex ways in which proteins interact, in an effort to determine how a type of cancer can act aggressively in one patient and slowly in another.
"Right now, we can determine if the patient will live a long time or die early, but that's not much consolation. We want to know why," Dr. Jurisica says.
He hopes that his research will help make cancer diagnosis more sophisticated. For example, women can now be tested for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that signal a higher chance of getting breast or ovarian cancer - and some with the mutation opt for preventive mastectomies or hysterectomies. But many women with the mutation do not develop cancer, and many women without the mutation do. Dr. Jurisica says molecular profiling will help researchers figure out who is most at risk, and treat them accordingly.
The cancer supercomputer is also analyzing millions of images of proteins from the World Community Grid, a network of individuals who donate their computers' downtime to crunching numbers for various good causes, including cancer research. One of the goals of that project is to be able to recognize the very early signs of cancer, so it can be caught and treated sooner.
The Ontario Cancer Institute got the supercomputer with grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, as well as an in-kind donation from IBM of hardware, software and services.
While it is the most powerful supercomputer used for research in Canada, it is only the second-most powerful computer in the land: Environment Canada's supercomputer, used for weather forecasting, is still No. 1 on the list of Canada's supermachines.
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How the computer in your den can pitch in
You don't need a supercomputer to help research cancer.
In fact, the regular old computer you use to send e-mail and watch YouTube videos could be analyzing images of disease-related proteins while you sleep.
A project called the World Community Grid relies on thousands of individual volunteers who donate their computers' idle time to a variety of research projects; in addition to cancer research, they include improving rice crop yields, discovering dengue fever drugs, climate modelling in Africa and designing anti-HIV drugs.
How it works: Volunteers register on the World Community Grid website and install a program on their computers. When the computer is idle, the program will request data from the World Community Grid's server, perform computations on the data, and send them back to the server.
As of yesterday, 392,788 people had participated and donated more than 169,000 years of computing time. Most of the World Community Grid programs can be run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating systems.
For more information: worldcommunitygrid.org
Rebecca Dube
