sept. 1, 2010 ·
Fujitsu and University of Tokyo have successfully built a supercomputer that can be used for development of anticancer drugs. The built of the supercomputer would enable the researchers to device supercomputer simulations in designing basic structures for antibody drugs, paving the way for development of 3rd generation antibody drugs with fewer side effects. There type of drugs is expected to treat types of cancers with a high incidence rate in Japan, including cancers of the lung, colon, stomach, liver, pancreas, prostate and breast, as well as the advanced staged cancers that have relapsed or undergone metastasis. For the first time ever, the new research will use molecular dynamics to design artificial antibody drugs. This is done by simulating interaction between antigens (protein) that are part of a cancer cells and antibodies (proteins). In comparison to traditional IT-based drug development simulations which is through observing the interactions between simpler molecules and proteins, new method required approximately 10 times the quantity of calculations, which has led the researchers to use supercomputer, capable of performing large amount of calculations in a shorter time. Through use of supercomputer, researchers are aiming to design antibodies in a matter of a few months, shortening the design process which would have required at least 3 to 4 years. The new supercomputer is a cluster of 300 PRIMERGY BX922 S2 blade server nodes, where each node features 2 Intel Xeon X5650 processors, allowing a total of 600 CPUs and a theoretical peak performance of 38.3 teraflops, where each teraflop translate to one trillion floating point operations per second. The inter-node communications is equipped with an InfiniBand QDR network interface capable of data transfer of 4Gb/s, while permitting a high-speed parallel calculations. In respect to storage the system is equipped with 5 ETERNUS DX80 disk array units with an effective RAID6 capacity of 1 petabyte.
