Lobachevsky, a supercomputer at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod, in the mid-Volga area, helped create a virtual clone of the human being. With the innovation, physicians can now come up with the best possible therapy for a patient before treatment or surgery actually begins.

As Prof. Viktor Gergel, Director of UNN Institute of IT, Mathematics and Mechanics, put it, ‘the computer has designed a virtual model of the human organism, including the smallest blood vessel.’

According to him, more than 50 million parameters were used to make a computer model of the heart alone. In serious cases where doctors had to typically resort to surgery, they can now ‘examine the body from outside and virtually get inside, if required, too, and study each organ in detail,’ the scientist said.

On top of that, Prof. Gergel added that researchers can ‘tailor’ the virtual clone to any specific patient, taking his or her physiological particularities into account.

Prof. Grigory Osipov, Head of the Department of Control Theory and Dynamics of Machines at UNN, believes that physicians can use the computer to analyze a range of options for treating a patient — a kind of experiment impermissible on a living person.

Lobachevsky was launched at Nizhny Novgorod’s largest university last year. Its peak performance is about 600 teraflops, and one teraflop means a trillion operations a second — thousands of times more efficient than any PC. Lobachevsky is Russia’s second most powerful university-based supercomputer after one at Moscow Lomonosov State University and is now ranked No 189 in top 500 world’s most powerful supercomputers.

This is an edited version of an article first published on the website http://www.tcc.unn.ru/