Combating Cancer With Data

Researchers used scanning electron microscope images of nanometers-thick mouse brain slices to reconstruct cells into a neocortex structure (center), whose various cell types appear in different colors. For decades, scientists have worked toward the'holy grail' of finding a cure for cancer. While significant progress has been made, their efforts have often been worked on as individual entities. Now, as organizations of all kinds seek to put the massive amounts of data they take in to good use, so, too, are the health care industry and the U.S. federal government. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are collaborating on three pilot projects that involve using more intense high-performance computing at the exascale level, which is the push toward making a billion billion calculations per second (or 50 times faster than today's supercomputers), also known as exaFLOPS (a quintillion, 1018, floating point operations per second).