Sandy, UT — (press release excerpt) — Linux NetworX announced today that the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging (NCMI) at Baylor College of Medicine will use the company's clustered computers in its world-renowned molecular imaging research center. Using a 32-processor cluster system, Baylor College of Medicine reconstructs the molecular configurations of disease and illness-causing viruses and… other molecules and develops three-dimensional models of their structures. A cutting-edge technique then allows researchers to view the viruses as if they were locks. By properly studying these “locks,” they hope to find the “keys” to opening and destroying them.

In the past, much of this research was done on large supercomputers costing millions of dollars. But today, because of price-performance issues, clustered-computer alternatives are being selected to handle the large amounts of computation, data handling and storage required. “We are able to create virus replicas, allowing us to rotate the images, cut them apart and view them from all directions,” said Steve Ludtke, computational biologist, Baylor College of Medicine. “In this way, we can discover their vulnerabilities and develop biochemical methods of taking advantage of those weaknesses.”

In the past, scientists used trial and error methods to create vaccines and drugs to fight viruses. But now, using clustered computers and other technologies,
they are able to define the structure of these viruses and attempt to design drugs that will solve the specific problems each one presents.

 
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