October 2017 Summaries

The digital twin concept is revolutionizing the engineering sector by enabling virtual representations of products that allow for enhanced design investigation, in-service optimizations, and quality assurance. This technology helps engineers predict real-world behavior, optimize designs, and gain deeper insights, particularly with the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT), which links real-time data to these digital models for a more comprehensive understanding of physical systems. However, creating digital twins poses challenges as they require integration across diverse systems, necessitating collaboration between engineering and IT teams to unify disparate tools. Joris Poort, CEO of Rescale, highlights the role of vendor-agnostic cloud high-performance computing (HPC) platforms like Rescale in overcoming these challenges.

At Metabiota, infectious diseases and their spread are analyzed through advanced epidemic risk models to assist the insurance, commercial, and government sectors in understanding the probability of human and financial losses due to epidemics. By using in silico models, Metabiota simulates the global transmission of diseases such as pandemic flu, SARS, and Ebola, incorporating data on disease emergence, spread, infection rates, and economic impacts. These simulations involve millions of calculations that require substantial computational power, which is facilitated by Rescale's cloud computing platform, allowing the team to perform over 18 million simulations in a day. This capability enables the team to rapidly assess the risks associated with infectious diseases, fostering collaboration and cost-efficiency while producing tools to enhance resilience against global epidemics.