Supercomputing saves lives

The average life expectancy in most countries is rising. But as a result, our medical needs are becoming more complex—and there’s pressure on global healthcare to keep pace.

HPC helps improve and accelerate the diagnosis of disease and even helps identify the best care pathways. For example, machine learning systems enabled by HPC, can be trained to identify anomalies within images, such as patient scans, through comparisons with wider datasets.

Researchers at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) are investigating the applications of this technology by helping ophthalmologists to detect retinal diseases more quickly. The researchers used analytical models to process scans of patients’ eyes through the center's HPC cluster. As HPC evolves further, the degree of granularity will increase, facilitating even more accurate image recognition and opening up brand-new disease areas for diagnosis.

This technology has many other applications too, including modelling exactly how the human brain works, like a project at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in Germany. There, they are trying to solve one of biology’s greatest mysteries—how the human brain creates consciousness. And as analytics advance, HPC can become a vital tool for healthcare worldwide, even as our needs become more complex.

Breakthroughs in computing systems have made it possible to tackle immense obstacles — from Dallara’s obsession with innovative and safe racecars, to oil field exploration, to financial risk assessment, to genome mapping at the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, to predicting weather patterns that protect coastal communities at North Carolina State University. Advancements in HPC have propelled our understanding of the world and universe at an exponential rate.