Two minutes

A supercomputing professor

Srinivas Aluru says his work is a lot like building a house. To get a structure up, contractors and subcontractors have to work in parallel, so the right crews are working the right jobs at the right times. The same thing has to happen when Aluru is working with CyBlue, Iowa State's IBM supercomputer that has 2,048 processors working in parallel to handle up to 5.7 trillion calculations per second. Computer engineers such as Aluru have to figure out which of those processors get which pieces of data and then write step-by-step algorithms to tell the processors what to do with all the information.

Combining supercomputing and biology: Aluru was a young assistant professor when curiosity brought him to an international conference on computational molecular biology. He listened. He talked. He read. And he decided the combination of computers and biology would lead to some exciting science.

Solving the puzzle of the corn genome: Aluru, a Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been working with Patrick Schnable, director of Iowa State's Center for Plant Genomics, to assemble the corn genome. It's no small piece of construction: There are tens of millions of short DNA pieces that have to go together.

Aluru and his research team have come up with supercomputing solutions -- including a software technology called "PaCE" -- that generate draft genome assemblies in hours or days instead of months. And that brings researchers that much closer to using their understanding of the corn genome to increase yields, improve nutrition and boost biofuel production.

-- Mike Krapfl