A new supercomputer facility could provide a 4D RCT – a CAT scan ‘movie’ of lungs - which could lead to new advances in asthma and cystic fibrosis research, Australian scientists have reported.
Credit: Stephen Dubsky & Andreas Fouras
SYDNEY: Research into human disease, climate and astronomy are set to benefit from a supercomputer facility launched in Melbourne today that will allow researchers to view samples in 3D and in real time.
The two supercomputers are housed at Melbourne’s Monash University and the Australian Synchrotron, a Melbourne-based science facility that uses beams of light to provide atom-scale analysis of scientific samples.
Called MASSIVE (Multi-modal Australian ScienceS Imaging and Visualisation Environment), the supercomputers, which operate at terabyte speeds, will allow scientists to view their sample in real time, avoiding long data-processing times and allowing them to shift the synchrotron beams to get a better viewpoint.
Providing cat scan ‘movies’
“In the past, the technology just didn’t exist to capture or view data or manipulate samples in a three-dimensional sense,” said Andrew Peele, a specialist in X-ray imaging and head of science at the Australian Synchrotron.
Instead scientists would have had to wait to model their sample then apply for beam time again.
Biomedical engineer Andreas Fouras from Monash University said he would be “hammering at the door” to use the facility. Fouras said the supercomputers would provide a 4D CT – a cat scan ‘movie’ of the lungs that would allow him to see the lungs in action and could lead to new advances in asthma and cystic fibrosis research.
In the world’s top 500
The new facility is one of the top 500 in the world and will be able to process data at speeds of just under 100 ‘teraflops’, about 100 trillion operations a second, said Wojtek Goscinski of Monash University, the equivalent of copying and writing a DVD every second.
“Scientists literally have terabytes of data and this will allow them to see that data visually and make judgement calls in real time, said Goscinski, who is the co-ordinator of MASSIVE.
Science research is pushing supercomputing capacity to even greater speeds to accommodate the wealth of scientific data generated by climate, health, social and astronomy research, said Sydney astrophysicist Brian Boyle.
Unprecedented “explosion of data”
“There is an explosion of data going on all around us,” said Boyle, of the CSIRO, and director of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. “It’s like looking for a knowledge needle in an information haystack.”
Boyle said MASSIVE was a “crucial step in the way forward in this information revolution”, but he added that there was still a drive to even greater data-crunching capacity.
The SKA, an ambitious astronomy project that will eventually see hundreds of radio astronomy dishes connected across over 5,000 km, would require speeds of an ‘exaflop’ - equivalent to a billion gigabytes.
“That’s about the total amount of new information provided by the world in a month, or more words than humanity has ever spoken,” said Boyle.
Byte = storage space
You can't measure computational speed in gigabytes or terabytes. Maybe you meant gigaflops and teraflops.