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Computing a Cure For HIV

Posted by Soulskill on from the petaflops-for-science dept.

aarondubrow writes: The tendency of HIV to mutate and resist drugs has made it particularly difficult to eradicate. But in the last decade scientists have begun using a new weapon in the fight against HIV: supercomputers. Using some of the nation's most powerful supercomputers, teams of researchers are pushing the limits of what we know about HIV and how we can treat it. The Huffington Post describes how supercomputers are helping scientists understand and treat the disease.

9 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Bitcoin mining? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Imagen if all that computer power was put to use such as finding the cure of HIV.... We would be done by lunch time.

    1. Re:Bitcoin mining? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It isn't lack of computing power that is holding back most theoretical biophysics research.. it's the lack of people who have the rare combination of skills of a programmer, mathematician, chemist, biologist and drug engineer coming up with novel and unique ideas to combat disease who will sacrifice industry paychecks to work in academic fields.

    2. Re:Bitcoin mining? by cashman73 · · Score: 2

      who will sacrifice industry paychecks to work in academic fields.

      Why do researchers have to sacrifice an industry paycheck to do it? In other words, why won't industrial pharma hire more talented scientists. They seem instead to be more interested in hiring salespeople, lawyers and MBAs, then contracting with academia so they can take advantage of "cheap labor" due to the overabundant supply of low-paid graduate students and post-docs. But then they wonder why the amount of NDAs (New Drug Applications) has been declining.

    3. Re:Bitcoin mining? by gnupun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why do researchers have to sacrifice an industry paycheck to do it? In other words, why won't industrial pharma hire more talented scientists. They seem instead to be more interested in hiring salespeople, lawyers and MBAs...

      Perhaps, it has something to do with the high failure rate of such research. Would you pay a salary to 1000 employees, of which only one employee gives you solid results and the remaining fail? That's not very business friendly. This type of research is more feasible under govt. grants.

    4. Re:Bitcoin mining? by bmo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Perhaps, it has something to do with the high failure rate of such research. Would you pay a salary to 1000 employees, of which only one employee gives you solid results and the remaining fail?

      >implying that this is bad

      Typical bean-counter/MBA attitude.

      That's not very business friendly.

      Companies like HP, Xerox, etc, built empires on that kind of research.

      They declined when they spun off or closed their research divisions because management failed to see the value/use the output of the research labs. The HP example is particularly striking - they went from an advanced technology company to a schlock printer seller, one that is sneered at and loathed, in a handful of years. Xerox is also striking in that PARC laid the foundation for a lot of modern computing but management only saw money to be made in copiers and filing paper and thusly ignored most of PARC's output, ceding the computer revolution to other companies.

      It is also part of a larger problem. Because of the emphasis on short-term profits (quarters are too long!) at the expense of everything else, we in the West are so enthusiastic at shoving all our production to the Chinese and others saying "We can't be arsed to get our hands dirty; we want to just do the high-level stuff like design and company management" totally ignoring the fact where the production goes, so does the engineering development, science research, and eventually even upper-management. This was learned by Samuel Slater, Francis Cabot Lowell, and others who founded the "silicon valley" (Blackstone Valley) of the Industrial Revolution. A lesson forgotten through complacency, greed, and snobbery.

      Alexander Graham Bell is shouting at you from his grave calling you a moron.

      --
      BMO

  2. Computing also prevents HIV by Rashdot · · Score: 2

    Because we don't get out much.

    --
    This is not the sig you're looking for.
  3. /Very/ different hardware by gentryx · · Score: 2

    Computational drug design and bitcoin miners have in common that both run best on custom hardware. The crux is, that both require very different types of hardware. As an example, please refer to Anton, designed by DE Shaw Research exactly for molecular dynamics (MD) codes.

    Bitcoin mining is classified as a so called embarrassingly parallel algorithm, while MD is a tightly coupled problem. Hence an efficient parallelization for MD codes is much harder to speed up: communication gets in the way, and communication is essentially always bound by the speed of light.

    ps: fun fact: bitcoin mining and MD can be carried out (at least somewhat) efficiently on GPUs.

    --
    Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
  4. Re:Misleading headline by pepty · · Score: 2

    Humans have never found a "cure" for a virus. We've been able to find cures for bacterial infections, and we've been able to find immunizations for SOME viruses (NOT a cure, just a stimulation of the body's own immune capabilities) but NEVER a cure for a virus.

    Hepatitis C.

  5. OR... by peter.kowalchuk.reid · · Score: 2

    Condoms. Cheap, plentiful, and 99% effective.