On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
Drug type companies eat typical 0.5% system time.
Could you please explain what you mean here ? That they buy lots of CPUs but only use a fraction of them or only for a fraction of time ?
They are far behind, which is not so logical; i would consider it old fashioned to do experiments on monkeys (Bar-ilan brain experiments on monkeys rings a bell?), so doing everything in software is far more logical.
Maybe your knowledge about the pharma industry is far behind ? "Doing everything in software is far more logical" only when you can exactly express biological processes in mathematical terms which is not true in the great majority of cases. F.e. molecular dynamics (often used to simulate interactions at molecular level, f.e. of a drug injected into the body) is based on several approximations and the implementations are subject to numerical errors. Would you take a drug that was produced based only on a simulation with molecular dynamics and found to be good enough ?
Similar concerns apply to all levels - the brain, as you mention it, is still very much an enigma, otherwise artificial intelligence would be all around us (or not, if deemed to dangerous...). And when you don't know how an organ or system works, how can you develops drugs only by simulations ?
When someone is really in big need for big calculation power, one makes dedicated cpu's for it.
I tend to agree, provided that the dedicated CPU brings a really big advantage, like an order of more of magnitude. F.e., to stay in the pharma related field, that's the bussiness case for DEShaw Research's molecular dynamics chip (Anton) which is supposed to bring a significant increase in speed for MD simulations compared with software solutions running on general purpose CPUs (or GPUs).
-- Bogdan Costescu IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany Phone: +49 6221 54 8869/8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8868/8850 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
