When 13th-century Indian religious scholars painstakingly incised spiritual philosophies on palm fronds to preserve for future generations, they could not have imagined that a team of 21st-century scholars would one day be working with high-performance computers to further preserve and make them accessible. This is what researchers from the Center for Preservation of Ancient Manuscripts (CPAM) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) are doing for ancient Hindu documents, the Sarvamoola Granthas.
High Performance Applications
The cause of Alzheimer’s disease is not yet identified and there is currently neither an understanding of the pathogenesis of the disease nor a rational strategy towards a treatment. It is clear that deposits in the brain consisting of small peptides identified as beta-amyloids play some role in the destruction of brain cells that ultimately leads to dementia and complete loss of brain function. One of the leading hypothesis is that the beta-amyloid deposits bind copper, which then catalyzes the generation of hydrogen peroxide from dioxygen, which causes oxidative damage. Unfortunately, the structure of these Cu-amyloid deposits are not available and nobody knows how copper binds to these peptides.
As scientists report that global temperatures are rising and polar ice melting more rapidly, it has become increasingly more important for polar scientists to conduct research quickly and accurately. In 2008, researchers from the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) approached the Data Capacitor team at Indiana University (IU) to help them move and manage a very large data set containing valuable and irreplaceable data on Greenland’s polar ice sheets. CReSIS scientists needed a way to quickly and reliably move 20 Terabytes of data to be processed on IU’s Quarry supercomputer.
