Molecules and supercomputers in Second Life
It is strange as we talk about this project all the time, yet as Ugotrade was looking for a link to it on eightbar it turns out we had not covered it well enought. So here we go.
We have said before about taking things from one place and regerenating them in another to find interesting ways to visualize data and system architectures and workflows in a business.
This project by our collegues in Watson took the result of some complex protein folding on a blue gene supercomputer and then injected the result of those calculations on the structure of a rhodopsin molecule into a scripted object in Second Life which then built a huge representation of that molecule.
The guys have an interview here over on SLNN.com Rez Tone and Zha Ewry are the main contacts.
The interesting thing is that as well as being a scientific visualization it has a place as an art installation and a though provoking place to gather. Inventiably when people gather there they tend to ask so what is this then? This leads to much deeper conversations about life sciences and supercomputing at IBM.
I tend to use this little clip of me sitting in the molecule to deomstrate the scale of this. Remember its all generated, not a manual build.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
There is actually quite a lot of molecule rezzing going on in SL, albeit on a smaller scale than rhodopsin (you might want to fix that link btw). You can rez a peptide live on IBM Almaden and there is even an SL Molecular Structure Group (which includes an IBM av) due to have its first meeting later this month. There is a fledgling database of structure availability/deployment hosted off the wiki at http://secondlifemolecules.wikispaces.com/proteins as well as a script that does a little of the parsing from pdb files. As a personal project I’m hoping to produce a toolkit that makes this kind of build more accessible to teachers and students. We had an informal meeting on ANGEL just before Christmas which I recorded on my blog (http://tidalblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/protein-fest-first.html). It was just great seeing those structures rez! (SL: Graham Mills)
January 15th, 2008 at 6:59 am
[...] I think QSL will be visiting the, “The Rhodospin Membrane Protein,” soon. This build on the IBM Research Shared Work Island resulted from a simulation done on the Blue Gene supercomputer. In the picture below, Zha Ewry, Pema Pera and I are sitting in the molecule discussing the meta implications of a visualization of a visual molecule in a virtual world (for more on this build see this post on eightbar, SLNN, and the molecule tour on Destroy TV’s Flickr photostream). [...]
February 15th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Bodybuilding Protein
Pure Liquid Bodybuilding Protein
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:57 pm
As Peter mentioned above, we’ve been doing chemistry in SL for over a year now. For a brief synopsis see here: http://slusage.com/chemistry.asp