Fastest Supercomputer in the World Models Dark Matter, HIV Family Tree Simultaneously

In November of last year, scientists at Los Alamos National
Laboratory switched on Roadrunner, the world's fastest
computer. IBM and the Department of Energy built the machine
to model nuclear explosions, but two new studies, both
released today, are proof that the computer's massive power
has been at least as devoted to peaceful science as to
simulating thermonuclear weapons.

In one experiment, the Roadrunner created the largest family
tree of HIV ever produced. The family tree incorporated over
10,000 HIV DNA sequences culled from over 400 infected
subjects. And in another use, Roadrunner simulated the Big
Bang in an attempt to figure out how dark matter came to
pervade the universe.

For the HIV study, Roadrunner donated its processing power to
allow scientists to compare the ecosystem of viruses across
a number of different patients. A single person can have as
many as 100,000 different versions of the the HIV virus in
their body at once, and learning how these mutants branch off
from the initial infecting agent could help develop
a vaccine. Until now, doctors didn't have the computing power
to analyze that many sequences at once. By looking at so many
different strains across so many different people, the
researchers hope to find common elements that a vaccine could
attack.

The dark matter story, on the other hand, fell more into
Roadrunner's wheelhouse, since the explosion of the Big Bang
isn't too dissimilar from the hydrogen bomb detonation
Roadrunner was originally tasked to perform. To create the
model of the early universe, Roadrunner calculated the
physics behind 64 billion proto-galaxies, each one about the
size of of a billion of our Sun. Once Roadrunner crunched
those giant numbers, the results predicted five-times more
dark matter than astronomers have observed to date.

All that, and I bet you could play a pretty awesome game of
Call of Duty, too. Although I guess that would defeat the
"swords to plowshares" vibe of using a computer designed to
model nuclear weapons for helping medicine and physics.