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High Performance Computing as a critical discovery and support infrastructure in Bio-Medical Research and Practice

Abstract: In this popular talk I will report on my own personal experience in supporting and promoting computational biology and medicine. Beginning from 1994-96 with the two conferences ”Advances in Computational Life Sciences 1 & 2” which I organised in Melbourne, Australia to series of conferences held in 2015-2021: “Supercomputing Frontiers” and “Supercomputing Frontiers Europe”, which frequently featured supercomputing and HPC based medical research. I will report on dedicated computing infrastructure projects conducted for the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore in support of Biomedical Research Council and Genome Institute of Singapore. I will describe how InfiniCortex: a global concurrent supercomputer together with InfiniCloud – a cloud instance over four continents, was demonstrated for genomic research. My recent and unusual involvement in the CAR-T immunotherapy project will be briefly mentioned.

Dr Marek Michalewicz is a world-class expert in high performance computing, simulation, he is a scientist, entrepreneur and inventor. In 1987–2000 he worked in research institutions in the USA and Australia, where he dealt with the use of supercomputers in scientific research. From 2009 to 2016, he was the CEO of A*STAR Computational Resource Centre (A*CRC) – the largest scientific supercomputing centre in Singapore. He was one of the people responsible for the planning and creation of Singapore’s National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC). In 2014, Dr. Michalewicz initiated the InfiniCortex project – a global concurrent computer network on four continents in seven countries with a data transfer capacity of 100Gbps. From September 2016 till the end of 2021 Dr Michalewicz worked at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM), University of Warsaw, first as the Deputy Director – HPC Operations and Infrastructure, and then from July 2018 till the end of 2021 as the ICM Director. During his tenure as the Director ICM introduced several new, successful initiatives and programs such as Omics Data Science – Bioinformatics and Biomedical Multiscale Data Analysis (https://icm.edu.pl/edukacja/kurs-omics-data-science/ ), ICM Covid-19 Epidemiological Model for Poland (https://covid-19.icm.edu.pl/ ) – the main model used by the MInistry of Health in predicting development of the epidemic in Poland, Warsaw Team – the first Polish student team competing at the main Student Cluster Competitions (https://icm.edu.pl/warsaw-team/ ), and several other initiatives and commercially successful projects. During the last three years of Dr Michalewicz’s tenure ICM contributed to the University budget more than 15 million zł – on average more than 5 million zł annually. Dr Michalewicz ran a series of international Supercomputer Frontiers Europe conferences at ICM with close to 1000 participants from 80 countries in the last two editions.

Marek Michalewicz
Visiting Scientists
Sano Centre for Computational Medicine, Krakow, Poland

Monday, 18th July 2022, 2:00-3:30 PM (CEST)

Join via ZOOM on seminar.sano.science