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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
IBM BUILDS GRID FOR BREAST CANCER
DIAGNOSIS, SCREENING
IBM and the University of Pennsylvania announced a powerful computing Grid
that aims to bring advanced methods of breast cancer diagnosis and screening
to patients across the nation, while reducing costs.
Built with open standards, the University of Pennsylvania Grid is a massive
distributed computer that delivers computing resources as a utility-like
service over the Internet. Enabling up to thousands of hospitals to store
mammograms in digital form, the Grid will provide analytical tools that help
physicians diagnose individual cases and identify cancer "clusters" in the
population. It will also give authorized medical personnel near-instantaneous
access to patient records and reduce the need for expensive film X-rays.
The system combines IBM eServer UNIX and Intel processor-based systems with
IBM's DB2 Universal Database to create a uniquely powerful solution.
"Once a patient's mammograms are loaded into the system, they can be
evaluated
with powerful tools that isolate abnormalities very quickly by comparing
current X-rays with those from previous years," said Dr. Robert Hollebeek,
director of the university's National Scalable Cluster Lab. "Traditional film
X-rays of individual patients are often scattered among various medical
facilities, making them hard to find when needed. This Grid will help ensure
that all of a patient's vital data is provided to authorized physicians very
quickly, efficiently and securely."
Hospitals are connected to the Grid via secure Internet portals that allow
authorized physicians to upload, download and analyze digitized X-ray data.
Advantages of the Grid include:
- Fast data retrieval -- authorized physicians have immediate access to a
patient's previous and current mammograms, no matter where or when the X-rays
were taken.
- Computer-assisted diagnosis -- X-ray data can be scanned with powerful
software that identifies potential tumors and other problems, helping
physicians diagnose patient illnesses.
- Pattern identification -- Sophisticated algorithms can uncover patterns
that appear in the population, such as cancer "clusters," or abnormal
concentrations of the disease in a particular community.
- Cost savings -- Each year, the average hospital spends $4 million to
develop X-ray films, according to estimates. Participation in the Grid could
result in an average yearly cost savings in the millions of dollars.
- Training -- A suite of educational tools will be deployed on the Grid
to
help doctors, medical students and interns learn more about breast cancer and
related diseases.
Now in its early stages of deployment, the University of Pennsylvania Grid,
in
collaboration with a group from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ACT at BWXT),
connects hospitals at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago,
University of North Carolina, and the Sunnybrook and Women's College Hospital
in Toronto. It is funded by the National Library of Medicine.
In the future, the University of Pennsylvania will work to extend the Grid
to
additional medical institutions. The design of the system is capable of
serving thousands of hospitals.
The Power Of IBM eServer
The University of Pennsylvania Grid is built with a three-tier architecture
that leverages the strengths of IBM eServer and open protocols from Globus. At
the user level, each participating hospital is equipped with a portal
consisting of two IBM eServer xSeries systems. One xSeries machine serves as a
temporary repository for the digital data, and the other is a link to the next
generation of the Internet, called Internet2.
Once the data is loaded into the portal, it is transmitted to a
metropolitan
hub -- an IBM eServer Cluster 1600 UNIX system. When the Grid is fully
deployed, data from several metropolitan hubs will be funneled to a
high-capacity regional hub, which is now being prototyped with an IBM eServer
Cluster 1300 Linux system.
The three-tiered system -- running AIX, Linux and Windows -- illustrates
the
inherent heterogeneity of computing Grids.
Teams from the University of Pennsylvania and IBM are partnering to develop
a
fast-access, very large capacity DB2 Universal Database to serve as the
secure, highly-available repository for the digitized X-ray data.
IBM's Grid Leadership
The University of Pennsylvania Grid is the latest in a series of Grid
projects
that illustrates IBM's leadership in this space.
Earlier this month, IBM was selected to build the North Carolina
Bioinformatics Grid, which will be developed in collaboration with
GlaxoSmithKline Inc., Biogen, the University of North Carolina, Duke
University and other organizations.
In August, IBM was selected by a consortium of four U.S. research centers
to
build the world's most powerful computing Grid, an interconnected series of
Linux clusters capable of processing 13.6 trillion calculations per second.
The Grid system -- known as the Distributed Terascale Facility -- will enable
thousands of scientists around the country to share computing resources over
the world's fastest research network in search of breakthroughs in life
sciences, climate modeling and other critical disciplines. IBM is also
partnering with several centers in the UK National Grid to provide key
technologies and infrastructure for the project, which is linking a massive
network of computers throughout the United Kingdom.
In addition, IBM is building a powerful computing Grid for universities in
the
Netherlands.
Open Standards
Just as electricity is delivered to homes over an electrical grid,
Computing
Grids allow geographically distributed organizations to share applications,
data and computing resources. A new model of computing, Grids are clusters of
servers joined together over the Internet, using protocols provided by the
Globus open source community and other open technologies, including Linux.
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