yoshaw
05-10-2007, 02:01 PM
IBM's Austin-designed gaming chip goes to work on medical challenges.
By David Ho
NEW YORK BUREAU
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
http://img.coxnewsweb.com/B/03/51/72/image_5372513.jpg
Peter Hofstee: IBM engineer says he is glad to see the Cell chip put to medical uses.
Peter Hofstee's PlayStation 3 has a mission: When it's not amusing his 11-year-old son with simulated car racing, the machine twists virtual proteins, using its speedy Cell microchip to help researchers understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer.
Hofstee, the IBM Corp. engineer who seven years ago helped start the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Cell design center in Austin, has added his Sony Corp. game console to the more than 30,000 worldwide that are enrolled in the Folding@Home project.
That Stanford University effort harnesses idle computing power from homes and offices around the world, creating a virtual supercomputer to tackle medical challenges.
The latest generation of PlayStations have much to offer because of the Austin-designed Cell. The chip, widely associated with gaming, increasingly is being used in medicine, where its ability to process detailed 3-D images helps with everything from studying tumors to simulating a beating heart.
That the Cell powers more than monster-slaying games is especially meaningful for Hofstee, IBM's chief Cell scientist in Austin.
"We really did have ambitions beyond games when we started it, and it's great to see that come to fruition," Hofstee said. He said new uses for the Cell appear "almost on a weekly basis."
The Cell chip has an IBM Power processor and eight related cores, or processing units, that can run many software operations simultaneously.
IBM uses the chip in a line of specialized servers designed to handle complex graphics and intense calculations. The company said in April that it would meld Cell technology with mainframe computers to support the demands of online virtual worlds such as "Second Life."
The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., unveiled a very different use last month.
Using an IBM Cell blade server and the clinic's own software, researchers greatly accelerated the processing of 3-D medical images, such as those from X-rays or magnetic resonance imaging.
That, in turn, speeds up the complex comparison of 3-D scans taken on different days or with different scanning machines. Perfectly matching and layering multiple scans is useful for monitoring the progress and treatment of diseases such as cancer.
"As the population has more and more chronic disease, it's more and more frequent that we have an old exam to compare," said Dr. Bradley Erickson, director of the Mayo Clinic's radiology and information processing lab.
Erickson said he needs better tools to track subtle changes in patients with brain tumors and multiple sclerosis.
Creating scan comparisons typically takes too long to be practical for day-to-day medicine, but the new approach takes seconds instead of minutes, Erickson said. He said comparing aligned scans can help radiologists reach a conclusion more quickly with up to 20 percent more accuracy.
He said the Cell processor is ideal because working with medical imaging is similar to manipulating video game graphics.
Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle feel the same way. At a workshop in July on computers and medical imaging, they plan to demonstrate how the Cell technology can improve the quality and speed of ultrasound scans.
Last year, researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute used several Cell servers to reconstruct a 3-D image of a beating human heart from MRI scans. People could view the heart with special glasses and manipulate and make virtual incisions while it was moving.
"In the future, you might be operating on somebody and repairing their heart valve while only making minimal incisions and not even having to string a camera inside," Hofstee said.
The Folding@Home project brings medical imaging into people's living rooms. The PlayStation consoles use free software to display jiggling molecules, a representation of the complex calculations.
Proteins are long strings of amino acids that fold themselves into shapes to serve as the basis for fundamental biological functions and create structures such as bone, muscle and skin.
"The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery," said Vijay Pande, the Stanford professor who leads the project.
"When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious effects, including many well-known diseases," he said. The distributed computing project "has allowed us to accurately simulate folding for the first time and to now direct our approach to examine folding-related disease."
With more than 270,000 personal computers and PlayStations actively helping, the project is among the most powerful distributed computing networks. Its processing power has approached 1,000 trillion calculations per second — more than three times the peak performance of a top supercomputer.
That would be akin to every one of the world's 6.6 billion people solving more than 151,000 multiplication problems each second.
About two-thirds of the project's power now comes from the recently added PlayStations, which process protein folding about 20 times as fast as a typical PC.
Pande said his own PS3 is part of the project.
"It folds," he said, "when I'm not playing games."
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/05/08/8cell.html
if old news, sue me. j/k don't!
I meant close the thread
By David Ho
NEW YORK BUREAU
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
http://img.coxnewsweb.com/B/03/51/72/image_5372513.jpg
Peter Hofstee: IBM engineer says he is glad to see the Cell chip put to medical uses.
Peter Hofstee's PlayStation 3 has a mission: When it's not amusing his 11-year-old son with simulated car racing, the machine twists virtual proteins, using its speedy Cell microchip to help researchers understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer.
Hofstee, the IBM Corp. engineer who seven years ago helped start the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Cell design center in Austin, has added his Sony Corp. game console to the more than 30,000 worldwide that are enrolled in the Folding@Home project.
That Stanford University effort harnesses idle computing power from homes and offices around the world, creating a virtual supercomputer to tackle medical challenges.
The latest generation of PlayStations have much to offer because of the Austin-designed Cell. The chip, widely associated with gaming, increasingly is being used in medicine, where its ability to process detailed 3-D images helps with everything from studying tumors to simulating a beating heart.
That the Cell powers more than monster-slaying games is especially meaningful for Hofstee, IBM's chief Cell scientist in Austin.
"We really did have ambitions beyond games when we started it, and it's great to see that come to fruition," Hofstee said. He said new uses for the Cell appear "almost on a weekly basis."
The Cell chip has an IBM Power processor and eight related cores, or processing units, that can run many software operations simultaneously.
IBM uses the chip in a line of specialized servers designed to handle complex graphics and intense calculations. The company said in April that it would meld Cell technology with mainframe computers to support the demands of online virtual worlds such as "Second Life."
The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., unveiled a very different use last month.
Using an IBM Cell blade server and the clinic's own software, researchers greatly accelerated the processing of 3-D medical images, such as those from X-rays or magnetic resonance imaging.
That, in turn, speeds up the complex comparison of 3-D scans taken on different days or with different scanning machines. Perfectly matching and layering multiple scans is useful for monitoring the progress and treatment of diseases such as cancer.
"As the population has more and more chronic disease, it's more and more frequent that we have an old exam to compare," said Dr. Bradley Erickson, director of the Mayo Clinic's radiology and information processing lab.
Erickson said he needs better tools to track subtle changes in patients with brain tumors and multiple sclerosis.
Creating scan comparisons typically takes too long to be practical for day-to-day medicine, but the new approach takes seconds instead of minutes, Erickson said. He said comparing aligned scans can help radiologists reach a conclusion more quickly with up to 20 percent more accuracy.
He said the Cell processor is ideal because working with medical imaging is similar to manipulating video game graphics.
Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle feel the same way. At a workshop in July on computers and medical imaging, they plan to demonstrate how the Cell technology can improve the quality and speed of ultrasound scans.
Last year, researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute used several Cell servers to reconstruct a 3-D image of a beating human heart from MRI scans. People could view the heart with special glasses and manipulate and make virtual incisions while it was moving.
"In the future, you might be operating on somebody and repairing their heart valve while only making minimal incisions and not even having to string a camera inside," Hofstee said.
The Folding@Home project brings medical imaging into people's living rooms. The PlayStation consoles use free software to display jiggling molecules, a representation of the complex calculations.
Proteins are long strings of amino acids that fold themselves into shapes to serve as the basis for fundamental biological functions and create structures such as bone, muscle and skin.
"The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery," said Vijay Pande, the Stanford professor who leads the project.
"When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious effects, including many well-known diseases," he said. The distributed computing project "has allowed us to accurately simulate folding for the first time and to now direct our approach to examine folding-related disease."
With more than 270,000 personal computers and PlayStations actively helping, the project is among the most powerful distributed computing networks. Its processing power has approached 1,000 trillion calculations per second — more than three times the peak performance of a top supercomputer.
That would be akin to every one of the world's 6.6 billion people solving more than 151,000 multiplication problems each second.
About two-thirds of the project's power now comes from the recently added PlayStations, which process protein folding about 20 times as fast as a typical PC.
Pande said his own PS3 is part of the project.
"It folds," he said, "when I'm not playing games."
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/05/08/8cell.html
if old news, sue me. j/k don't!
I meant close the thread