A graphical, parallel biological world.....

This Wednesday (April 4) at 2pm Pacific time, I will be presenting a lecture entitled "Scenes from a grahical, parallel biological world" to the Embryo Physics groups in Second Life. The lecture (see slides here) will be an excursion into the world of GPU (graphical processing unit) computing. I have been interested in GPU computing for a few years now, and interested in computer graphics for significantly longer.

 Scene from the Embryo Physics course (between classes).

This is a different approach to using CUDA architectures, which for most scientists is all about solving their mathematically-intensive problems faster. My interest is a bit more philosophical. I wish to understand the connections between parallelism and high-powered graphics processing (e.g. image rendering) in the service of designing novel data structures for analyzing scientific data. In this case, I am interested in what we can learn from a host of biological systems (ranging from population biology to cell biology).

Perhaps this approach can be leveraged to better understand the self-organization and underlying context that characterizes many biological systems. This talk represents a first step in this synthesis, but should be interesting in any case.

UPDATE (4/4): A blogscript of the talk is available on this page.