Exascience Life

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January 2013 to December 2015
IWT SBO

ExaScience Life is a large interdisciplinary IWT project, set up as a collaboration between the five Flemish universities and two industrial partners: Intel and Janssen Pharmaceutica. The broad topic of ExaScience Life is to explore scientific applications for the next generation of supercomputers. Today, we are building peta-FLOP scale supercomputers, for the next decade we are expecting exascale. Such massive increase in processing power unlocks new types of scientific applications, exascale computing is therefor seen as a new driving force for scientific discoveries.

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ExaScience Life is a large interdisciplinary IWT project, set up as a collaboration between the five Flemish universities and two industrial partners: Intel and Janssen Pharmaceutica. The broad topic of ExaScience Life is to explore scientific applications for the next generation of supercomputers. Today, we are building peta-FLOP scale supercomputers, for the next decade we are expecting exascale. Such massive increase in processing power unlocks new types of scientific applications, exascale computing is therefor seen as a new driving force for scientific discoveries. However, the jump to exascale computing faces several challenges. New hardware, software and algorithmic breakthroughs are required before we can scale existing computations and unlock new types scientific applications. ExaScience Life is tackling life sciences applications, specifically: gene sequencing and bio statistics. Both are critical for the long term vision of pharmaceutical companies, but are also limited by the amount of computational power that can be brought to bear. Not only can time and costs be reduced significantly, the exascale computing power can enable new analysis and modeling techniques that are simply not possible today within a relevant timescale. This project is a large cooperation between computer scientists, computer architects, mathematicians, statisticians, biologists and pharmacologists. The VUB is represented by the Software Languages Lab (SOFT) and applies its expertise in parallel programming to the work unit on programming models and runtime environments.