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Supercomputers: powering medical innovation in the 21st century

Professor Rick Hillum, CEO of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Wales collaboration, explains how supercomputing can be used to help speed-up breakthroughs in medical research.

Over the past two centuries, innovations in healthcare have led to breakthroughs such as the administering of antibiotics, the use of anaesthesia and wide-scale vaccination programmes – to name but a few. By mid-way through the 20th century, we could perform complex operations causing minimal harm to patients, protect soldiers from war wound infections and prevent ourselves from contracting a range of harmful diseases – saving millions of lives.

The medical industry has continued to progress since these developments: from the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, to harnessing insulin for the treatment of diabetics, and the production of countless medical devices and aids. 

Supercomputers are now powering the next generation of medical and healthcare innovation. The advanced technology is already being used across a range of industries to address many of the challenges facing modern society: whether it’s to predict weather patterns and consumer trends, mitigating the effects of climate change or, in the case of healthcare, developing new drugs and treatments to address a wide range of debilitating diseases and conditions. The scale and complexity of these problems mean that traditional problem-solving human delivered techniques can be both costly and time-consuming.

Even in today’s age of unprecedented technological advancement with the development of personalised drugs and stem cell research for example, medical researchers working on cures for heart disease, cancer, obesity and many other human ailments still perform basic trial and error experiments in laboratories. This approach can involve excruciatingly slow timelines. Supercomputers are increasingly being relied on to speed up these processes considerably.

So what is supercomputing? Also known as high performance computing, supercomputers can be thought of as large collections of individual computers connected together, working in parallel on a single problem. They are capable of performing complex and high-volume calculations and simulations at top speeds, reducing analysis times from weeks to days, or even hours. 

Supercomputing networks can perform hundreds of trillions of operations per second. To give you an idea of just how fast this is, imagine the following: all seven billion people in the world have a calculator and are asked to perform one calculation per second twenty-four hours a day, nonstop. Based on a supercomputer that can perform around 300 trillion operations per second, it would take the world’s population approximately thirteen and a half hours to do what it can do in just one second.

An example of how supercomputers are currently being used within the health sector can be seen at the University of South Wales, where researchers are using supercomputing technology to develop our understanding of bacterial evolution, with the aim of transforming the current state of antibiotic treatments. With the recent rise in drug resistant infections, such as MRSA and tuberculosis, many scientists and doctors are concerned about a potential antibiotic crisis. This research is aiming to predict drug resistance and help GPs select the most appropriate antibiotics for their patients.

The academics are using supercomputers to understand how generally harmless bacterial strains can evolve into toxic strains, such as E. coli 0157. The technology has enabled the researchers to analyse vast amounts of data at incredible speeds, in this case reducing the data analytics time from days to hours.

In addition to the time-saving benefits, supercomputer-based applications like advanced modelling and simulation also enable research teams to innovate and improve products and services.

Calon Cardio-Technology Ltd for example uses the technology to aid the development of the next generation of affordable, implantable micro blood pumps for the treatment of chronic heart failure. These pumps, known as Ventricular Assist Devices (VADs), have the potential to save many thousands of lives as they provide an alternative to heart transplants.

However, while they are a viable treatment for heart failure, the current generation of VADs are large, requiring highly invasive surgery and can cause long-term damage to the blood. Calon Cardio is addressing these problems through the development of a much smaller and cheaper VAD that can be directly implanted into the heart, minimising the damage to the blood, offering an extended life expectancy and helping to ensure an improved quality of life for the patient.

When simulating the flow of blood inside the VAD, using a standard desktop computer results in a very long cycle time for each simulation. Typically, running just one case could take up to a week, whereas with a supercomputer the process can be reduced to less than a day – even down to a few hours.

This is the kind of performance that can superpower the development of the next generation of healthcare. This technology can transform and ignite research potential, and is now available to academics and businesses of all sizes across the UK, along with the training and support to exploit it effectively. 

The examples outlined above provide only a snapshot of how supercomputers are powering potentially life-saving work, both by businesses and academics, for the long-term benefit of us all.

HPC Wales is a collaboration between Welsh universities, government and Fujitsu, supported by the European Regional Development Fund.

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