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Supercomputer, Purdue assistance puts Colombia on fast track to designing new HIV drugs, science and engineering discovery

  • Science Highlights

Colombian researchers are helping design new drugs for treating HIV using a supercomputer built in a partnership between the Universidad EAFIT in Medellin and ITaP Research Computing.

Besides trying to identify likely drug targets for new HIV treatments, EAFIT’s first supercomputer, named Apolo, is being used for everything from earthquake science in a country regularly shaken by tremors, to a groundbreaking examination of the tropical disease leishmaniasis, to the most “green” way of processing cement. The machine, built from parts of Purdue's retired Steele community cluster, speeds the time to science for Colombian researchers and lets them tackle bigger problems.

While the hardware is important, the partnership is also about people. ITaP Research Computing staff members have traveled to Colombia to help train and to work with EAFIT colleagues, and EAFIT students have participated in Purdue’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) program working with a variety of supercomputing experts at ITaP.

EAFIT and ITaP have even sent joint teams to student supercomputing competitions in New Orleans and Frankfurt, Germany. Some of the Colombian students on the teams have become key staff members at Colombia’s Apolo Scientific Computing Center, which, in turn, is training the next generation of Colombia’s high-performance computing experts.

Read the Purdue news release on the partnership.

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