Some serious illnesses such as HIV tend to change, or mutate, rapidly within the body of a person suffering from the disease. Any number of factors can impact the ways the viruses mutate. For example, such factors may have to do with the properties of the patient’s genome, the treatments that were chosen earlier, and other biological factors. This leads doctors treating patients with these diseases to resort to a process that involves much guesswork, since it is not always apparent which treatment will work the best.

Recent research preformed at the University College London [1, 2] promises to change this way of working and to provide more robust solutions for professionals in the medical field. By using the techniques of grid computing, Prof. Peter Coveney and his team were able to generate results that test the medications on the Virtual Physiological Human. Grid computing is the technique that allows researchers to separate their simulations over a large number of CPUs that need not be centrally located [3]. The Virtual Physiological Human is a project that aims to map the human body in a way that “will enable collaborative
investigation of the human body as a single complex system” [4]. The application of the distributed computers allowed the time needed to conduct the simulation to be reduced dramatically, despite the huge amounts of data that need to be processed (on the order of 15 GB per simulations). For each patient, two simulations need to be run, one which considers the history of this patient and the other which attempts to predict the mutations of the virus. Currently, it is possible to complete this process in under two weeks.

The relatively short time needed to complete the simulation, however, make it feasible for this type of work to be used by doctors treating actual patients. As scientific computing develops even faster algorithms for distributed computing, such advances may become commonplace.

The results of this research also indicate that scientific computing has a substantial impact on society. For one, the correctness of these algorithms is not yet guaranteed, and when computing systems are used to may life and death decisions, then it is necessary to consider the implication of the failures of these systems. In addition, will medical users get an advantage in time allocations for the high performance grid computers needed for this type of work? What if the information is leaked and medical privacy is compromised?

As computers become more powerful and as scientific computing concepts and simulations become more useful, these and other hard questions will need to be answered. However, advances such as this show how beneficial scientific computing advances may be to humanity.

[1] http://www.scientific-computing.com/news/news_story.php?news_id=333
[2] http://www.chem.ucl.ac.uk/people/coveney/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing
[4] http://www.biomedtown.org/biomed_town/STEP/Reception/step_presentations/RoadMap/plfng_view