ExaScience Life Pharma - ExaScience Life Pharma

From 01-07-2013 to 31-12-2015

Description

The overarching goal of the ExaScience Life Lab, and this project in particular, is to understand the current and future HPC needs of the pharmaceutical industry and to help the HPC industry prepare to fulfill those needs. For this reason, this combined project (of two linked proposals) involves industrial partners from both the pharmaceutical (Janssen Pharmaceutica) and HPC (Intel) industries, to provide both sets of boundary conditions: the requirements of the applications, and the available computer technologies to improve performance. However, bridging the gap between the two different industries remains a significant challenge, and for this reason the project also includes academic experts across the whole stack from the pharmaceutical applications programs, down through the design of algorithms and software, to the exploration of possible computer designs. Particular problems include how to manage the massive levels of parallelism that will be required to reach the computer performance targets, how to simulate different computer designs to be able to explore the space of computer designs, what sort of programming model is acceptable to the users, and what the best algorithms are to achievehave efficient and usable solutions to simulation and data processing. To address these challenges, we have selected world-class experts from Imec and the five Flemish universities. By providing solutions to these problems, this project will show how to solve the computational problems of the pharmaceutical industry using expected improvements in hardware technology. This project will serve as the foundation to build a long term research lab for this topic, to serve the important and growing biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors in Flanders and Europe. As HPC is a strategic interest rather than a core competence of the life sciences companies, such a 3rd party lab is this best way to provide them with the information and services needed that they need to make the step to genuinely benefiting from HPC as a technology. Similarly, such a lab is ideally placed to feed information back to technology companies about the relevant characteristics of driver applications and how technology solutions can be tuned to them.

Team

• Jan Fostier, Co-promoter (External)
• Piet Demeester, Co-promoter (External)
• Tim VandenBulcke, Co-promoter (External)
• Geert Molenberghs, Co-promoter (External)
• Yves Moreau, Co-promoter
• Karl Meerbergen, Co-promoter (External)
• Jan Aerts, Co-promoter
• Wilfried Verachtert, Promoter (External)
• Inge Thijs, Team member

Financing

Funding: IWT - Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie 

Program/Grant Type: IWT O&O - IWT Industrial R&D projects