I began my training this morning for the Avon Walk by taking 1 hour walk before the sun rose. My goal is to put in a minimum of 10 hours per week walking and increasing it as we get closer to the walk on May 1st and 2nd. I was delighted to receive Jeanne Mandelblatt’s email yesterday informing us that the Lombardi team is now up to 23 walkers. This is one more than we had last year and there’s still time for the team to grow. Since we’d like to raise significantly more money than we did last year, I think it would be great to increase the number of walkers to 40 or 50. So there’s still time to sign up!
I had an interesting vist to Oak Ridge National Laboratories on Wednesday. As many of you know, Georgetown University has a memorandum of understanding with ORNL related to systems bio-medicine. Several Lombardi faculty have collaborative research activities with ORNL colleagues funded through this collaboration. I was there this week to discuss opportunities for deepening collaborative ties with ORNL with an emphasis on systems bio-medicine as it relates to cancer in general, and on the G-DOC. It was a busy day of meetings so I didn’t get to do much touring of the facility, which contain some historically significant buildings and pieces of equipment – including one of the first atomic reactors. ORNL is also home to the largest and third largest computers in the world. The largest one, called Jaguar, has 2.3 “petaflops” of processing power, which means it can make 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second. As far as I can tell, it is created by placing 10,000 dual-processor laptops in parallel. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the task, it requires 2 gigawatts of power per year just to keep the machine cool and an additional 7 megawatts per year to supply power to the equipment. They plan to increase the capacity of their computer another hundred- to thousand-fold over the next decade. It it sounds as though they may need a nuclear plant to provide sufficient power for the equipment.
Interesting factoids aside, ORNL possesses exceptional high-performance computing capabilities. It will be interesting and potentially very valuable to identify ways we can collaborate with them to analyze increasingly complex data sets, such as integrated clinical and molecular databases of cancer.