10 Awesome Reasons To Love Supercomputers

From their sheer scale to the multitude of things they can do, there are many reasons to love supercomputers. Here are just ten of them!

10. They can diagnose and recommend treatment for diseases

Move aside, Doctor House. Watson is here. Credit: Shutterstock.

Diseases such as cancer are complicated, requiring customized therapy. For example, leukemia refers to a group of blood cancers that respond very differently to available treatments. Using genetic data from a patient, doctors can make better treatment decisions, but not before sieving through thousands of mutations to identify which specific leukemia subtype the patient suffers from.

Enter Watson, IBM’s supercomputer which can compare a patient’s genetic data against medical databases to make diagnoses. It accomplishes in ten minutes what a human doctor would have taken two weeks to achieve manually. Being an internet-based system, Watson can extend its diagnostic services beyond the US where its hardware is located. It has since been deployed in Asia, assisting doctors in Thailand and India. Move aside, Doctor House. Watson just stepped in.

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This article was first published in the print version of Supercomputing Asia, January 2017.

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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

Jeremy received his PhD from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he studied the role of the tumor microenvironment in cancer progression.

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