PORTO SALVO, Portugal April 17, 2007 Microsoft Portugal today launched a High Performance Computing Lab for the development of Hipercâmbio - High Performance Computing Applied to Medical Data and Bioinformatics a project designed to support breast cancer scientific research in Portugal.
Located at the companys head office at Porto Salvo, the main purpose of the Hipercâmbio Project, the first project emerging from the Microsoft Portugal HPC Lab, is to apply HPC technologies to breast-cancer research. Founded on a partnership between Microsoft and the University of Beira Interior, the project aims to enable the processing of high-volume medical data associated with breast cancer among Portuguese women by developing parallel and scalable processing algorithms.
With a minimum three-year duration in view, the Hipercâmbio Project currently led by a team of four people, including two in-house Ph.D. students is geared toward improving and providing a more accurate process for the automatic identification of breast cancer patients. By initiating this project, Microsoft Portugal marks a significant contribution to the early detection of beast cancer. Research in this field depends heavily on the ability of technology to process high volumes of medical data, and the use of HPC and parallel processing algorithms are particularly suited for this endeavor. Microsoft Portugal and the University of Beira Interior expect to arrive at the first set of scientific results, subsequently published in magazines and specialty conferences, during the second year of the project.
