Aug 16 (Reuters) - A scientist at Harvard used Google’s cloud platform to clone a supercomputer for a heart disease study, in a novel move that other researchers could follow to get around a shortage of powerful computing resources and speed up their work.
The study simulated a therapy that aims to dissolve blood clots and tumor cells in the human circulatory system that required an enormous amount of computing power that typically can be harnessed with a supercomputer, according to Harvard professor Petros Koumoutsakos.
In the U.S., there are only a handful of supercomputers that are capable of running the billions of calculations to accurately mimic the conditions in Koumoutsakos’s study.
To eliminate the bottlenecks researchers and companies such as Citadel that need an enormous amount of computing resources only found in supercomputers have begun to turn to the public cloud.
They are designed for millions of individual, relatively small computing tasks - things such as streaming video, serving webpages or database access.
Modifying cloud infrastructure to behave like a supercomputer requires changes in the software, networking and physical design of the hardware, Magro said.