CSC – IT Center for Science and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), together with ten other academic and commercial bodies, are launching the European HPC Center of Excellence for Personalised Medicine (PerMedCoE) in October.
- PerMedCoE will boost the competitiveness of European personalised medicine and aims to become the community hub for Exascale-ready software in this domain, says ICREA Prof Alfonso Valencia, PerMedCoE Coordinator and BSC Life Sciences Department Director.
The next generation of exascale supercomputers make it possible to make one step forward in personalised medicine. The three-year Center of Excellence project (PerMedCoE) aims at more accurate diagnostics and more personalised treatment. The project will develop personalized medicine data analysis methods for supercomputers such as EuroHPC's LUMI. LUMI is a pre-exascale flagship supercomputer hosted by ten European countries, and it will be placed in CSC's data center in Kajaani, Finland. LUMI will be one of the world's leading scientific computation research infrastructures when the operations start in 2021.
The project will develop cell-level modeling software that is suitable for high-performance computing. Through the use of high-performance computing, data analysis can be accelerated, enabling the introduction of biological data such as genomics and proteomics as part of the diagnosis of diseases. At present, a comprehensive genome analysis using computing clusters can take weeks or even months. With high-performance computing and use of the correct software, successful diagnosis of diseases could in the future take just days or even hours.
- CSC's role in this project is to act as one of the leading international partners. The objective is to work with ELIXIR Finland and different researchers to develop the algorithms used in precision medicine to be suitable for high-performance computing and also to further increase the information security of CSC's computing platforms. In this way, we will be able to significantly shorten the calculation time required for precision medicine analyses, says Sampo Sillanpää, who has been selected to manage this project at CSC.
- The option of high-performance computing would enable individual-level data analyses. When this technology is ripe for introduction into health care, processing of cell and genomic data could be included when identifying diseases and locating the right treatment, says Tommi Nyrönen, Director of ELIXIR Finland.
PC Center of Excellence in Personalised Medicine - PerMedCoE
This article was first published on 8 October by CSC.
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