A 鈥淪ELF-HEALING鈥� supercomputer running 500 times faster than any other could
help unravel the molecular secrets of disease, say computer scientists at IBM.
The company is spending $100 million to develop Blue Gene, a novel
computer which operates under rules described as 鈥渟imple, many and
self-healing鈥濃�擲MASH for short. The task is to model the folding of
proteins, which could ultimately aid drug design and help in the understanding
of biochemical defects.
Blue Gene鈥檚 SMASH protocol will organise a million simple processors on the
鈥渟elf-healing鈥� principle, allowing adjacent processors to monitor each other鈥檚
operations, and shut down faulty components as the need arises. If several
restarts fail to cure the problem, IBM vice-president Ambuj Goyal says the
component will be 鈥渙stracised鈥�, while other processors will replace its
function.
Self-healing has long been a holy grail for computer designers. In the 1980s,
researchers tried and failed to build complete computers on silicon wafers using
a technique called wafer scale integration, in which faulty areas would be
ignored by advanced 鈥渟elf-organising, self-repairing鈥� software. But nobody
managed to perfect the technology.
Advertisement
IBM needed a computationally intensive task to test the speed of its SMASH
architecture. It chose protein folding as it involves complex 3D calculations on
very long molecules.