The role of supercomputers in managing healthcare technologies of tomorrow.

The healthcare sector has always been one of the earliest adopters of digital technologies. It is on the cusp of digitalization to deliver enhanced patient experience. Since the industry deals with a large volume of data, advancements and implementation of supercomputing is becoming more evident in the sector. Supercomputers have the power to perform billions of operations and computation per second. These computers are particularly used to solve multifaceted problems that are difficult to be handled with legacy computers.

Over the past few years, machine learning and computer science have made a monumental leap in healthcare. However, they have given the rise of unstructured, raw data that needs to be processed to derive actionable insights. With the advent of supercomputers in the industry, it has now become possible, allowing the processing of complex, big data in medical science.

Typically, supercomputing is used to forecast climate, perform flight simulations, assess seismic movements, envisage the effects of a nuclear explosion and study the universe. It is also being used to give answers to questions that are the history of science.

Supercomputing in Digital Health

Supercomputers play a crucial role in making digital health more convenient. As radiology and nuclear medicine departments face vast challenges of extensive clinical data generated and accumulated, supercomputers are the only way they can pave the way for big data analysis for this. Undeniably, medical data are often unstructured, but with deep learning algorithms, scientists can systematize data into a usable form, assisting them in diagnosing faster and better.

By automating labor-intensive processes using ultra-fast processors embedded in supercomputers, health providers can gain a reduction in time consumption and rise in accuracy and reach of medical facilities and better tracking. A supercomputer is able to process the entire database from clinical trials, experimental lab notes, and patients' health history, which helps verify the preliminary outcomes.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), for instance, is an institution that houses the most vital computing cluster on the Iberian Peninsula. The institution offers supercomputing services to the scientific community and has a team of researchers working in computer, earth and life sciences and on computer applications. Its main goal in the Life Sciences department is to deliver deeper insight into the origin, evolution and function of living organisms. On the other side, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, that runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on their supercomputer, works on many healthcare-related projects, such as around Dengue fever.

The Future of Healthcare Influenced by Supercomputers

Supercomputing can provide the future foundation for diversified diagnoses and optimized treatments as supercomputers can analyze voluminous amounts of information in milliseconds. It can also expedite the research and development across a multitude of healthcare research areas to power the medical breakthroughs of tomorrow.

Last year, in a bid to make Europe a top supercomputing region globally, the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC) selected eight sites across the EU to host the first European supercomputers to support the development of major applications in domains such as personalized medicine and drug design and development.