Proteins, Petaflops and Algorithms
W.R. Pulleyblank
Director, Deep Computing Institute
Director, Exploratory Server Systems
IBM Research, USA

Computational biology is an important, rapidly growing area of deep computing. The protein folding problem is one of the most intriguing problems - how does a protein form a three dimensional structure when it is placed in water? Modeling this process goes far beyond the capabilities of current supercomputers. I will discuss the problem as well as different solution approaches currently being tried. I will also discuss a project called Blue Gene which will build a petaflop scale supercomputer suitable for one approach to this problem within the next three years.


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