By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hot on the heels of its announcement earlier this month to build a supercomputer capable of unfolding human proteins, IBM Research has announced that it will offer $1m grants to research centers who participate in the US National Institutes of Health’s Protein Structure Initiative. IBM says that it will give grants to one or two of the three-to-six pilot centers participating in the initiative under NIH.
While the Blue Gene project seeks to simulate the process of protein folding, the Protein Structure Initiative will classify proteins by their shapes in the hopes that scientists will be able to correlate those shapes with the functions that proteins perform in human cells and the specific gene sequences in our DNA that create those proteins. The idea is that once we have the complete gene sequences from the Human Genome Project, scientists and medical researchers will want to be able to figure out what proteins are created by which gene sequences and their resulting shapes and functions.
Researchers estimate that they will have to categorize about 10,000 protein structures under the project, and the exact number of centers to be set up will be largely dependent on the amount of processing power each center has. To that end, IBM is committing the money to the NIH centers so they can in turn buy RS/6000 SP supercomputers and related software and services. Why IBM hasn’t committed to providing the full amount of hardware necessary for the project probably has more to do with the budgets at IBM Research than it does with IBM’s desire to have NIH adopt SP technology wholesale.
