Platform Flexibility

Profiles in Success: University of Lausanne

Dr Hussain-Khan stresses Apple’s support for the Cluster VS Cancer Foundation as a major factor in the project’s success to date. “Apple technology has been instrumental in the development and deployment of our campus-wide Grid infrastructures — our first phase of the project”, he says. “The ARTS award will give us the power to run that grid effectively”.

Apple technology will also help to reassure participants in the programme about how using their computers for virtual experiments will not impact other uses. “Testing shows that it will not affect the speed of people’s computers as long as they have enough memory. The great thing about the Mac platform is the way it handles the user’s job priorities transparently”.

An added bonus for the team is that the Mac Pro systems the project will acquire as part of the ARTS programme award will provide so much memory. “For the price, the Mac gives you a lot of computing power. Value for money for the future is a strong reason why we wanted to use the Apple platform here”.

“We looked at several technologies, but I was delighted when Apple offered us a four processing nodes cluster. It was so easy to configure with the middleware, and just worked brilliantly right out of the box.”

Dr Hamid Hussain-Khan, Technical Director of the Cluster VS Cancer Foundation

An important goal of the ARTS programme is to establish a community of researchers and their science institutions. Scientists will be able to collaborate and exchange information with their peers throughout Europe, and be offered the chance to participate in the Apple Developer Connection (ADC) programme.

“Cluster VS Cancer is a global project, and we will really gain from international contact through Apple”, says Dr Hussain-Khan.

The Cluster VS Cancer Foundation has decided to focus its first work on a promising research project in immunotherapy, designed to find a vaccine against melanoma. All data from the virtual experiments will be captured, analysed and made available to physicians, researchers and patients to improve the modelling process of vaccine development.

The ARTS programme is involved with a number of other potential research project Laureates at science institutions across Europe.