Revolutionizing Heart Disease Research: Harvard Scientist Harnesses Google Cloud for Supercomputer Simulation
In a new development that could be followed by other researchers, a scientist at Harvard University has harnessed the power of Google Cloud Platform to replicate a supercomputer for studying heart diseases, this innovative approach seeks to address the shortage of high-performance computing resources and expedite research efforts.
The study simulates a treatment aimed at dissolving blood clots and cancer cells within the human circulatory system, this treatment necessitates a substantial amount of computational power, typically obtained through supercomputers, as highlighted by Harvard professor Petros Komatsakos.
Komatsakos mentioned, “The major problem we were having is that we can run a simulation using a supercomputer at large scale,” he added that repeating or improving the simulation requires further access to supercomputing resources.
In the United States, only a few supercomputers are capable of executing billions of calculations to accurately replicate conditions, as per Komatsakos’ study.
Costas Bekas, the Chief Research Officer of Citadel Securities, noted that the scarcity of machines capable of conducting such research is causing a bottleneck in the scientific approach, to overcome these challenges, researchers and companies, such as Citadel, which require substantial computing resources found in supercomputers, are turning to public clouds.
However, cloud computing operations aren’t tailored to researcher’s demands. They are designed for millions of relatively small individual tasks within the realm of computing, like video streaming, serving web pages, or accessing databases, cloud computing is usually established for reliability and flexibility.
Bill Magro, Chief Technology Officer for High Performance Computing at Google Cloud, stated, “People recognize the potential of the cloud in solving problems and scientific engineering computing to really unlock productivity, get better answers, get better insights, and get there faster.”
Magro added that transforming cloud infrastructure to behave like a supercomputer requires changes in software, networks, and hardware design.
It’s worth noting that Citadel has supported Komatsakos’ research in collaboration with Google.
