SmartPlanet: You talk about something called the “computational model of the human body.” What exactly is that?
Larry Smarr: Well let’s start by understanding that we get about a factor of a thousand-fold increase in computer power for the same money every decade. This is known as Moore’s Law. As far as we can see this will continue. If you go back to just where we were in 2000, there wasn’t Google, there wasn’t Amazon, web services, the cloud really wasn’t an idea.
And now there are millions of processors in the various clouds that are out there. Project forward ten years and we’ll have the so-called excess scale computer, which is one million teraflops. So one million trillion computations a second. And it will be composed of about a billion processors of say the strength and the fastness that we have today. I don’t think it’s crazy that the cloud, instead of millions will be billions of processors.
SP: OK, that’s an almost unimaginable amount of computational power and speed. But what about the biological body connection?
LS: So last month, in July, the first scientific paper came out on a complete computational model of a single cell including all the metabolism and DNA replication. This is a quest that people have now been on for twenty years.
But it’s finally possible. If the fastest computer today has several hundred thousand processors and in ten years that computer will have a billion, I think we’re going to have pretty accurate models of entire human bodies.
SP: What will that mean for us?
LS: Well at the same time anyone who goes to the doctor will be able to get a patient’s full genome done for a few hundred dollars, about the same cost as a medical exam. And we’ll have that across hundreds of millions of people. It’s hard to understand how data rich the world we will be in ten years from now is compared to how data poor it was ten years ago.
- More Here
Larry Smarr: Well let’s start by understanding that we get about a factor of a thousand-fold increase in computer power for the same money every decade. This is known as Moore’s Law. As far as we can see this will continue. If you go back to just where we were in 2000, there wasn’t Google, there wasn’t Amazon, web services, the cloud really wasn’t an idea.
And now there are millions of processors in the various clouds that are out there. Project forward ten years and we’ll have the so-called excess scale computer, which is one million teraflops. So one million trillion computations a second. And it will be composed of about a billion processors of say the strength and the fastness that we have today. I don’t think it’s crazy that the cloud, instead of millions will be billions of processors.
SP: OK, that’s an almost unimaginable amount of computational power and speed. But what about the biological body connection?
LS: So last month, in July, the first scientific paper came out on a complete computational model of a single cell including all the metabolism and DNA replication. This is a quest that people have now been on for twenty years.
But it’s finally possible. If the fastest computer today has several hundred thousand processors and in ten years that computer will have a billion, I think we’re going to have pretty accurate models of entire human bodies.
SP: What will that mean for us?
LS: Well at the same time anyone who goes to the doctor will be able to get a patient’s full genome done for a few hundred dollars, about the same cost as a medical exam. And we’ll have that across hundreds of millions of people. It’s hard to understand how data rich the world we will be in ten years from now is compared to how data poor it was ten years ago.
- More Here
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