Report on application of Grid technologies in the medical field presented

Scientific seminar of Department No. 4 of the Institute of Information Technology of ANAS was held. The event was opened by the Technical Director of the Institute, Dr. Rashid Alakbarov. The seminar was dedicated to the application of Grid technologies in the medical field.

The report was presented by the institute fellow Samad Dursunov. He gave detailed information about the major role of biology, chemistry, physics and information technology in identifying the ways of effective treatment of diseases.

Speaking about the problems of the application of Grid technologies in the medical field, the reporter informed about these technologies. The term grid was first used in 1994 by American scientists - Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman. Grid system is distributed computing network using the computational power of computers connected to the network. Grid technology is applied in some fields as medicine, mathematics, physics, seismology, biology, astronomy and so on.

He noted that a number of projects had been carried out in the medical field based on grid technologies: "Rosetta@home" project aims to predict and design protein structures and protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions, which is the foremost problems of molecular biology. "POEM@Home" project working on BOINC platform aims at modeling protein folding. "DNA@Home" project implements calculations to study DNA bacteria that lead to bubonic cholera and tuberculosis diseases.

Mr.Dursunov also brought to the attention of the participants the information about the server and the users site of BOINC platform and "Word Community Grid" sub-projects.

It should be noted that, the presented research is carried out within the framework of the project of the Science Development Fund under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Then seminar participants exchanged views on the subject, many questions were answered.