First Tuesday at CERN

Distributed Computing for Global Health

December 8^th 2005

17:00 - 19:00

CERN Main Auditorium
 

A joint CERN openlab / EGEE event, organised by Francois Grey, CERN, and Vincent Breton, CNRS, in collaboration with rezonance.ch.

Draft Programme

Distributed computing can harness the power of thousands of computers, either within an organization or over the Internet, in order to tackle global health problems that are beyond the scope of a single research group. This First Tuesday shows how people and companies around the world are getting involved in this new opportunity.

17:00 General Intro

17:10 Vincent Breton, CNRS/EGEE "Grids for neglected diseases" 

This talk introduces the topic of distributed computing, explaining the similarities and differences between Grid computing, volunteer computing and supercomputing, and outlines the potential of Grid computing for tackling neglected diseases where there is little economic incentive for private R&D efforts. Recent results on malaria drug design using the Grid infrastructure of the EU-funded EGEE project, which is coordinated by CERN and involves 70 partners in Europe, the US and Russia, will be outlined. 

Vincent Breton has been a research associate at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). In 2001, he founded a research group on the application to biomedical sciences of the IT technologies and tools used in high energy physics. Co-founder of the Healthgrid initiative, chairman of the first European conferences on grids for health in January 2003 and January 2004, he is leading application support and identification activity in the EGEE european grid project.

17:30 Torsten Schwede, Biozentrum Basel "Tackling Dengue Fever with distributed computing"

This talk describes recent progress in a collaboration with Novartis to develop drugs for Dengue fever using distributed computing on the Swiss Bio Grid, a partnership which includes Biozentrum Basel, Novartis, The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, the Functional Genomics Centre Zurich, the Friedrich Miescher Institute and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

Torsten Schwede received his PhD in chemistry for his studies in the field of protein crystallography at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg. He joined GlaxoWellcome Experimental Research (Geneva) as a PostDoc in Protein Bioinformatics and continued his career as staff scientist at GlaxoSmithKline R&D (Geneva). Since 2001, he is Professor for Protein Structure Bioinformatics at the Biozentrum (University of Basel) and group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB).

17:50 Celia Moore, IBM “The World Community Grid”

18:10 Tom Smith, Swiss Tropical Institute "Malaria epidemiology and Africa@home"

This talk describes a volunteer computing project, currently under development, to drastically increase the computing power available for modeling the epidemiology of malaria. The project is a collaboration between the Swiss Tropical Institute, the University of Geneva, two Geneva-based NGOs and CERN, and involves participation from African Universities in Mali, Cameroun and Senegal. The project has been funded by the Geneva International Academic Network.

Tom Smith has worked in the field of malaria epidemiology for over 15 years, mainly working on the design and analysis of field studies and intervention trials in Africa and Papua New Guinea.  He currently heads the biostatistics group of the Swiss Tropical Institute, which recently completed a stochastic modeling platform for simulating the impact of malaria interventions in endemic populations. A current focus of this work is to port this application to a volunteer computing system.

18:30 Brian Williams, WHO "Getting to grips with global health data"

This talk describes how health workers in developing regions such as Africa are faced with huge amounts of data which, given access to adequate computing power, could lead to much better understanding and control of the spread of diseases such as TB and AIDS. The talk outlines future prospects of distributed computing for global health.

Brian Williams has worked for many years in epidemiology, in particular on malaria and other vector borne diseases for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and since 1994 in South Africa on occupational diseases of mine workers, where TB and HIV are overwhelmingly the greatest threat. For seven years he ran an AIDS project in Carletonville, the biggest gold-mining complex in the world, gathering data on miners and sex workers and trying to model this mathematically. He was then hired by WHO to work on TB modeling. He has recently helped to set up the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (SACEMA).

18:50 Q&A session

19:00-21:00 Networking cocktail