HPCwire: Calling Doctor Cray

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: From the Editor

May 27, 2008

Calling Doctor Cray

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has a great story this week about using supercomputers to perform prostate surgery. My prostate happens to be my third favorite organ and I'm not all that comfortable with a human being fiddling with it -- especially one with a knife in their hand. So this recent development is welcome news to me.

The technology is just in the early experimental stage, but it looks promising. Last month, the Lonestar supercomputer in Austin performed laser surgery on a dog in Houston without the intervention of a human surgeon. The procedure was developed by computational experts from UT-Austin, cyberinfrastructure specialists and systems from TACC, and technologists from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

According to the article, the first attempt "went off without a hitch." The cyber-surgery used Lonestar's computational muscle to drive the procedure, using precise lasers, state-of-the-art thermal imaging technology, and computational methods that synthesize complex information in a fraction of a second.

"We're basically bringing engineering tools into medicine," said J. Tinsley Oden, director of UT-Austin's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and principal investigator of the project. "We're making surgery an engineering or mathematical process."

Although Oden thinks the technology is five to ten years away for application on humans, the implications for future medical treatment are staggering. Since the procedure can be controlled remotely, it could make state-of-the-art surgical treatments available on a global scale -- talk about your Doctors Without Borders (although presumably you'd still have to worry about speed-of-light latency issues over long distances). One goal of the experiment was to demonstrate a more precise, minimally invasive version of laser surgery, so supercomputer-driven treatments would theoretically be safer and perhaps more effective than those performed by a mere mortal.

And less expensive. Considering the cost of computing infrastructure keeps dropping, expensive surgerical procedures may end up succumbing to the inexorable downward price pressure of Moore's Law. That would certainly shake things up in the health care industry.

Before you give your surgeon the boot though, it's worth noting that, according to the TACC article, the dog gave his life to the research project. Hmm, it might have been better PR if Fido had lived to tell the tale.

Posted by Michael Feldman - May 27 @ 7:31PM

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

HPC Powers Bobsled Team to Olympic Gold

For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Gelsinger Stuns Analysts and Colleagues with Storage Pool Plan

Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. Read more...

Cisco Containers Target Federal Market

Mar 15 | Data Center Knowledge | Company delivers UCS-container solution to NASA. Read more...

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html