The University of Warsaw's Interdisciplinary Center for Mathematical and Computational Modeling had selected IBM's Blue Gene/Q Supercomputer to support a biomedical and biotechnological research initiative aimed at developing new drugs and therapies for several ailments including neoplastic, neurological, and vascular disease.
The University of Warsaw is leading a consortium called the Center for Pre-clinical Research and Technology, or CEPT, a €100 million ($130 million) project that involves more than 500 life science and biomedical researchers as well as physicians and students from three universities and seven research centers.
They'll be using the supercomputer, which has been named Nostromo, to run analysis algorithms in order to identify rare genetic variants that are associated with chronic conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, diabetes, downs syndrome, and more and ultimately develop more targeted drugs and treatments.
"Nostromo is able to process up to 16 terabytes of …data per …sequence by running simulations at the speed of 210 trillion operations per second," Ales Bartunek, the country general manager for IBM Poland and Baltics, said in a statement. This should help "save years of research and help scientists take healthcare in Poland to the next level," he said.