This article is from the official account: On the Road Gezhi rostrum (ID: SELFtalks) , Author: Admiralty, Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, The picture of the title comes from: Visual China
Hello everyone, I am very happy to come to the “Gezhi Forum”. I am Jin Zhong from the Information Network Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, mainly doing research on high-performance computing, and my major is high-performance biomedical computing.
Today I mainly want to talk to you about high-performance computing and biomedical computing.
This year is a very special year, and everyone is also in the midst of the new crown epidemic. The epidemic is coming very fast. We are racing against the epidemic and the virus. This is also a race between scientific research and the virus.
When the epidemic comes, what shall we do?
First of all, we may have to find a way to treat, and we need drugs during treatment. When a sudden epidemic comes, what is the most important thing to find drugs? speed. Speed is the key to finding drugs now. With the help of supercomputers, the speed of drug discovery can be much faster than before.
We must have heard the story of Shennong’s taste of Baicao.
What if the ancients did not have medicine when they got sick? Can only resist hard. Shennong saw that everyone was in great pain, so he went to the mountains to taste the herbs, and finally obtained 365 kinds of herbs, which was written into a very important pharmacopoeia.
But then Shennong unfortunately passed away due to poisoning while trying the medicine. Using people to taste medicine is very dangerous, and its efficiency is very low.
What about Hyundai?
We now have the help of supercomputers to study drug molecules and drug mechanisms. After the research is clear, we will be lucky. We don’t need to test it personally, but first use the computer to help.
1. Supercomputer
The supercomputer is a behemoth, very, very large.
The supercomputers we use now can take upRoom. The supercomputer covers an area of several hundred square meters, which is even larger.
Paclitaxel is an anti-tumor drug. The right side of the figure below is a comparison between our calculations and experiments. What we do is the process where paclitaxel is loaded on the drug carrier and enters the body to continuously release it into the body.
When it is injected into the human body, it will begin to be released at 66 minutes, and it will only take effect in the body until 20 or 30 minutes later.
What does a supercomputer look like?
The picture above is the “Yuan” supercomputer of the Supercomputing Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This supercomputer consists of multiple large cabinets, which are very large. Each cabinet is a row of things called computing nodes.
A computing node is similar to the desktops and laptops we use now, but its computing power, storage capacity, and memory are much larger than our PCs.
The nodes of professional supercomputers are not as big as desktop computers. They are very thin. They are blade nodes, which are finally connected by high-speed network. On the back of the cabinet is a high-speed network, which is connected with a network cable, so that each computing node of the supercomputer can work together.
Moreover, the processors of supercomputers are also more powerful than the quad-core, six-core or even eight-core processors of ordinary home PCs. The CPUs used in supercomputers may be super powerful CPUs with more than ten cores and more than twenty cores. .