STONY BROOK, N.Y., April 17, 2007 - The Itanium(R) Solutions Alliance today announced the winners of the Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Contest at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing and Gelato ICE: Itanium Conference and Expo in San Jose, Calif. From a pool of 25 finalists in three categories, one winner in each of three categories will receive a $50,000 US cash prize or charitable donation.
Stony Brook's Simmerling won the top award in the Humanitarian Impact Innovation category. Working on an SGI Altix supercomputer located at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Simmerling and his team have developed simulation methods that can explore the molecular basis for disease at a level of detail beyond that possible through traditional experiments. The team recently achieved the most extensive computer simulations ever done on HIV protease, a molecule that slices a pre-HIV protein chain into the pieces that ultimately assemble into a mature and infectious virus. The simulations modeled how the viral protease changes structure over time, revealing for the first time how it transiently opens during its function, allowing drugs to gain access to the interior and inactivate it. The results provide vital data in the effort to develop new treatments for the 40 million people currently living with AIDS. Dr. Simmerling is also using simulations to enable groundbreaking research in the treatment of tuberculosis and cancer. With this award, the Alliance recognizes “a profound impact on humanity through research”.
"This is a tremendous honor — one that recognizes what human effort and technological advances can achieve when brought to bear on a problem that had previously proved insurmountable," said Simmerling, an associate professor in Stony Brook's Department of Chemistry and Director of Computational Biology for Stony Brook's Institute for Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery.
Simmerling has concluded that using NCSA's powerful Altix computer has made a dramatic difference in his research. "The Altix allows us to obtain new medical advances in months, rather than in years," he said.
The Itanium® Solutions Alliance is a global community of hardware, operating system and application vendors dedicated to accelerating broad optimization of enterprise solution stacks for key market segments including energy, government, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and telecommunications. Formed in September 2005, the Alliance is comprised of some of the most influential companies in the computing industry, including Founding Sponsors Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Hitachi, HP, Intel, NEC, SGI and Unisys; Charter Members BEA, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, SAS and Sybase; and Associate Sponsor PowerLeader. For more information about the Alliance Innovation Contest or the Innovation Award program visit www.itaniumsolutionsalliance.org/innovation/.
