Video Games Enhance Genetic Research

It might surprise you, but if you’ve got a Playstation 3 sitting at home, you’ve probably got some pretty decent hardware. You’d better hope so, considering how much you paid for it. But what I mean is that, given how beautiful the graphics are when you play Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, there is a lot going on behind those scenes.

 

And for the first time, a team of researchers at Michigan Technological University led by Roshan D'Souza are using the grunt that gives you those beautiful images to understand and witness real-life systems.   

The group is, for example, attempting to witness the human immune response to a tuberculosis bacterium. If they had wanted to do this a decade ago, it would have taken a relatively long time to witness the full run of events. But harnessing the power built into video consoles, using software developed by computer science student Mikola Lysenko, it takes much less time.    

"I've been asked if we ran this on a supercomputer or if it's a movie," says D'Souza, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering–engineering mechanics. But, he adds, "we can do it much bigger, this is nowhere near as complex as real life."

The real benefit is not just the speed, but the mechanics that allows researchers a new avenue for study. "You can create a mouse that's missing a gene and see how important that gene is," says Dr. Denise Kirschner, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who developed the TB model. "But with agent-based modeling, we can knock out two or three genes at once."

Agent-based modeling, ABM, is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous individuals in a network, with an eye to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. In other words, it’s what gives your enemies on the screen the ability to react, not only with you trying to blow their heads off, but with other enemies, buildings, etc   

Running the ABM’s on graphic processing units, GPU’s, allows for the increase in speed. The shortage of computational power has only recently been remedied, negating the need for clusters of computers or super-computers in favor of GPU’s.

"With a $1,400 desktop, we can beat a computing cluster," says D'Souza. "We are effectively democratizing supercomputing and putting these powerful tools into the hands of any researcher. Every time I present this research, I make it a point to thank the millions of video gamers who have inadvertently made this possible."

Posted by Josh Hill.

Source:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/mtu-fxt091608.php

 

 

Comments

[jer35mx]

If I understand well, it's in the hand of the programmers to simulate the whole War games movie computers in a simple game. Maybe some day the Simpson's world of Lisa will develop in a console.