JHU center receives funding from IBM
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"Johns Hopkins University is clearly a leader in biomedical research," said Beth Smith, director of IBM Life Sciences Solutions Development, in a recent press release. "The creation of the new Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling will be a strong catalyst for cross-disciplinary collaboration and will advance the use of information technology in discovery research. IBM is delighted to be Johns Hopkins' technology partner."
The new Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling was created with the sole intent of acting as a conduit for knowledge sharing and collaboration among many worldwide institutions.
Much of the work is being conducted in coordination with the Whiting School of Engineering, which currently conducts research on the heart and brain using imaging analysis, Queens College of Ontario, who was also granted a SUR Project award for heart research, and the University of California, San Diego.
The findings will allow researchers to find new targets for drugs as well as get better predictions of the effects of new drugs on animal and human test subjects. There is also hope that the study will give doctors better tools for diagnosing heart disease earlier by identifying the early gene expression changes. With an earlier diagnosis more can be done for the patient to ensure a long and happy life.
"In many diseases, there are significant changes in gene expression," said Raimond Winslow, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling.
"That's what we need to characterize: which genes are switched on or off and which sequences have important health consequences. Our job is to identify disease mechanics at the gene and protein levels, then identify a drug target that might be useful in treating the disease."
The new computer hardware will provide researchers with the power required to run the complex, detailed, processor intensive modeling simulations of the heart and other organs.
With such detailed models, the researchers will be able to get a more complete idea of how heart disease is triggered on the molecular level. In many instances the simulations will be studying thousands of genes and proteins at one time.
The new hardware will allow the knowledge gained in the research to be analyzed, catalogued, and available over the Internet to other institutions on high-power, high-bandwidth networks.
The award package is based around the IBM Life Sciences Framework, with hardware that includes an IBM eServer p690 computer equipped with 16 microprocessors and 64 gigabytes of memory.
It is backed by a 7-node IBM eServer xSeries Linux cluster on a fiber-channel storage area network powered by IBM's FAStT Storage Server and a robotic Virtual Tape Server subsystem that can store 28 terabytes of data. The massive amount of brute force power is required to be able to study large numbers of gene expressions in parallel, helping to make quick work of an important study.
The software portion of the award includes IBM's DB2 Universal Database and IBM DiscoveryLink data integration technology. The DB2 Database software, the industry leader of database solutions, will be used to manage the mammoth amount of information that will be generated by the study.
The DiscoveryLink, which was designed by IBM specifically for the Life Sciences industry to solve the problem of integrating very different forms of data into a concise form, will simplify the various results of the study into a more usable form.
The last portion of the award, the IBM WebSphere technology suite, will facilitate the sharing of information with universities and locations all around the world.
Any one on a high-bandwidth network will be able to access the information collected in the study and even aid in competition of the research. Thus, scientists from around the globe can collaborate in a massive study. And when the research is completed, all of the results will be in an easily searchable location so that the results are available to future research teams.
The IBM Shared University Research program is designed to provide universities with computing equipment, ranging from servers and data storage to personal computers, to aid in accelerating research in a field of mutual interest to both the university and IBM.