Figuring centrally at the symposium was the RIKEN Next- Generation Supercomputer currently under construction in Kobe, which will elevate simulations to an entirely new level of depth and detail.
In a keynote lecture, Peter Coveney of the University College of London provided a glimpse of how supercomputing would impact the future of medicine. “By the end of this century, biomedicine won’t look much like it does today,” he predicted. Coveney described a future in which high-fidelity simulations would be used in clinical medicine for diagnosis and treatment, highlighting changes to supercomputer policy that such applications would require.
In a session on molecular scale simulations, Siewert Jan Marrink of the University of Groningen discussed simulations of lipid nano-containers using coarse-grained methods, and Helmut Grubmüller of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry presented more fine-grained atomic simulations of protein folding. At the cellular scale, Dirk Drasdo of the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control discussed agent-based models for simulating tumor growth. Hideo Yokota of RIKEN followed with an outline of the cell-scale simulations to be performed using the new RIKEN Next-Generation Supercomputer.
Shifting focus to organ- and bodyscale simulations, Grace Peng of the US National Institutes of Health presented an overview of high-performance computing applications in biomedical research. James Bower of the University of Texas and Shin Ishii of RIKEN followed with a discussion of applications of supercomputing technology to the study of neurons and neural network models.
While still in the relatively early stages of its evolution, supercomputer technology and the class of powerful simulations it enables promise to revolutionize the life sciences in years to come. Attendees to the Second Biosupercomputing Symposium witnessed a unique preview of this new era of high-performance simulations, one in which RIKEN is positioned to play a leading role.
