London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine uses Apple Xserve cluster

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is using a computer cluster to speed up the search for a cure for diseases like Malaria and African sleeping sickness, which kills half a million people every year.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Science Research Infrastructure Fund (SRIF), the Apple supplied Xserve G5 cluster is being used to run simulations of viral DNA to create information on how the germs change over time.

Royal College research fellow Michael Gaunt says the calculations conducted by the cluster examine the DNA of the virus to look for clues that other scientists can investigate further in real lab conditions.

'We look at the molecular evolution of the parasite DNA for insights into how they behave, and the ones we are looking at are the really big developing world killers,' he said.

'Malaria alone has a global death rate of two million a year.'

The Gserve system used at the School contains 32 separate two gigabyte processors and is capable of performing calculations at levels the School has not been able to manage in the past.

The mathematical techniques being used are extremely computationally intensive, Gaunt says.

'For a long time I used a traditional Unix system, which was hugely expensive and did not generate a huge amount of power. On the Apple system we can do work that would have been absolutely unfeasible before,' he said.

'The throughput of work through this cluster is astronomical. The G5 has been an absolute quantum leap.'