Researchers at the University of Toronto are using Ubuntu

Sep 11, 2015 12:55 GMT  ·  By

IBM Power Systems servers are not something that you'd think to find helping a Ph.D. candidate fight cancer, but that's just the case. Also, the fact that they are running Ubuntu should not surprise anyone.

IBM Power Systems have been around for quite some time and these servers have made a name for themselves for being powerful and relatively cheap, given what they offer. They are usually found in more business settings, but there is nothing stopping them from working in other environments as well, like in medical research.

It's also a well-known fact that most of the servers out there are running some form of a Linux distribution. Ubuntu is one of the more famous ones, but SUSE also comes with support for IBM Power Systems, and there are a few others as well. In any case, it's nice to see powerful Linux servers being used for scientific purposes.

IBM Power Systems are working on cancer treatments

Jeffrey Cassidy is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto ECE and he's working on various projects. One of those projects involves "speeding up simulations for improved photodynamic therapy cancer treatment," and you really need some powerful solutions for that.

"The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Toronto, for example, uses Power Systems technology to collaborate with pharmaceutical companies and various medical centers to improve photodynamic therapy (PDT) for cancer treatment. In this case, it’s using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip attached to the IBM POWER8* Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) to speed up clinical PDT simulations," is noted on ibmsystemsmag.com.

The servers themselves are running Ubuntu, which somehow makes this entire endeavor even better. In fact, Canonical announced a partnership with IBM for POWER8, so it's not really a surprise.