Affordable DNA Sequencing And Computational Power
Super Computer
Roadrunner is a fast computer. To put the computer's speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM. Or, if each of the world's 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day. The investment into roadrunner is nothing compared to its abilities. Only, $100 million.
One of the applications of roadrunner among other military, financial, civil engineering projects is dissecting the evolutionary tree of HIV virus. Thanks to the supercomputer physicist Tanmoy Bhattacharya and HIV researcher Bette Korber were able to develop an evolutionary genetic family tree, known as a phylogenetic tree. This was done using samples taken by Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) across the globe from both chronic and acute HIV patients. Possibly identifying areas where vaccines would be most effective, with this tree, experts could look for similarities in the acute versus chronic sequences.
The idea is to identify common features of the transmitted virus that would aid to create a vaccine that would enable recognition of the original transmitted virus before the body’s immune response causes the virus to react and mutate.
Possibly identifying areas where vaccines would be most effective, with this tree, experts could look for similarities in the acute versus chronic sequences. This is just the tip of the iceberg, only one of the possible million biomedical applications of super computation.
DNA sequencing
SEQUENCING a person's genome will soon become cheaper than buying a used car. A company called Complete Genomics based in Mountain View, California, says it is reading entire human genomes at $5000 a shot, in 2009.
Data Storage
I am not going to talk about the data storage, as for $3.45 monthly you can have unlimited disk space.
İmagine, affordable DNA reading is combined with the super computational power and cheapest data storage of all times. The outcomes are beyond imagination for the time being.
Relevant:
http://www.techshout.com/scien...
