Computers power up against cancer
You might think that kids spend as much time on computers at school as they seem to at home.
But that’s not the case, according to Brady Yocom, 16, and Andrew Dear, 18.
A sophomore at du Pont Manual High School in Louisville, Yocom says she uses computers there every other day for 90 minutes and visits the computer lab once a week to do research for her biology, world civilization and French classes.
Dear, a senior at Louisville Male High School, describes a similar schedule.
“I use a computer in the lab maybe an hour a day to write papers,” he says. “Sometimes the lab is full but other times nobody’s in there.”
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U of L cancer researcher John Trent and colleagues are tapping into a powerful new computer network that combines hundreds, and soon perhaps thousands, of school-based computers throughout Kentucky.
When Yocom, Dear and their school peers aren’t in class learning programming, calculating a math problem or writing an essay, their computers sit idle.
According to one estimate, school computers in Kentucky are unused up to 80 percent of the time.
But that is changing.
Instead of powering down, many computers like Yocom’s and Dear’s are working at their full potential all day and night—making millions of calculations needed by researchers seeking new cancer treatments. The effort, called the Kentucky Dataseam Initiative, joins together private industry, U of L and Kentucky schools.
This “grid computing” network, lets researchers at U of L’s James Graham Brown Cancer Center, such as John Trent, tap into thousands of school machines statewide. This supercomputing array speeds up complex calculations for cancer studies.
To test and develop potential cancer drugs, researchers must screen vast libraries of molecular compound data, some of which contain millions of compounds that would take thousands of days to screen. What they’re looking for are combinations of compounds that could be made into drugs that specifically target proteins related to tumor growth.
“Now we can spread our task among many computers simultaneously to make the computations much faster,” Trent says.
How much faster? In some cases, from years down to days, say the researchers.
Dataseam, a private Louisville medical technology company, developed the nonprofit effort. The company is located in U of L’s co-owned 201 E. Jefferson at MedCenter Three building. Its CEO, Brian Gupton, says the state’s citizens get more bang for their buck from the project.
“Everybody wins,” he says.
So far, the grid includes hundreds of computers in the school districts of Caldwell, Warren, Jefferson, Scott and Jessamine counties. About 300 Macintoshes in the Jefferson County Public Schools are in the network and another 500 more will go online soon, says Steven Brown, a JCPS senior micro-software analyst.
Caldwell County first joined the grid early last year. Trent says those first 100 computers had an immediate impact.
“Those computers alone doubled our resources,” he says.
Researchers quickly found cancer-selective compounds that bind to particular proteins. The next step will be to examine the most promising compounds and conduct biological testing at the cancer center.
“This will definitely help us develop life-saving drugs and treatments faster,” Trent adds.