University of Washington’s Baker Laboratory has paired with Microsoft to use Microsoft’s cloud computing service Windows Azure to study proteins. Researchers are using Microsoft’s cloud computing platform to study protein structures and protein folding that could lead to treatments or cures for such illnesses as Alzheimer’s, Malaria, cancer and salmonella poisoning.
The partnership between the two developed when Microsoft IT’s Marlin Eiben wanted to show off the computing power of Windows Azure. Azure allows businesses and universities to “build, host and scale applications in Microsoft datacenters.” Eiben spoke with his son, a research technologist at Baker Laboratory and the result was the collaboration between “Dennis Gannon in the Microsoft Research Extreme Computing Group, who supplied the needed Windows Azure resources via Gannon’s cloud computing research engagement project;” and Baker Laboratory researcher Nikolas Sgourakis.
“If you can understand protein structures, at some point you will be able to interfere and make sense of mutations that cause diseases,” said Sgourakis, a visiting scholar at the Baker Lab who is using computational modeling to try to help solve the mystery of what proteins look like up close. “This body of work will motivate additional studies and pave the way for very exciting work to be done in the field.”
Sgourakis was working with salmonella trying to understand the way it infects people. To do that Sgourakis developed software algorithms to help with his research. Azure was able to run the algorithms through 2.5 million calculations in under a week verifying that the algorithms and process he devised would work. Next Sgourakis has planned to use Azure to calculate the properties of salmonella.
“Normally, this work would be shared by thousands of private machines owned by people who had donated computing time,” Eiben said. “Among these thousands, someone in Helsinki might offer time, and someone in Sao Paulo, but with Windows Azure Nikolas can get his results much faster and more reliably – you know, the person in Helsinki may shut his or her machine off and go on vacation for three weeks.”
Using private machines as described above is called grid computing aka distributive computing. Grid computing uses donated computer resources from computer users all over the world. Grid computing is used in a variety of research projects. For example, IBM’s World Community Grid was used in 2008 to develop solutions for the worldwide rice shortage. Baker Laboratory uses grid computing programs Foldit, Roesetta@home, and Robetta to run protein folding, protein shapes, and protein structure predictions.
Besides scientific research, Microsoft has also positioned Azure for use in campaigns with its Microsoft Townhall application, governments with programs like Public 360 running on Azure and with tools that encompass the iPhone and Android platforms.
Azure’s use at Baker Laboratory is rather unusual but demonstrates a new use of the platform. Usually it is used for Web startups, hosting content, websites and business applications and government applications like those mentioned above.
Finding new ways of using Windows Azure to provide better methods of conducting life saving research is a good use of Microsoft’s time, money and resources.