Milwaukee School of Engineering using Thelio Astras to study Mosquito DNA

One of the cool parts of my job is learning what some of the Ampere computers out in the world are doing. Sure Uber using our machines is awesome, but how about using them to study the DNA of mosquitoes?

Milwaukee School of Engineering is using the Thelio Astra with 128 cores to do mosquitos research. We are working on having Dr. Nowling on the Ampere Developer Impact series soon to learn more about this cross between cutting edge research and Ampere Machines.

MSOE professor RJ Nowling and his students study mosquito DNA to understand why some mosquitoes carry malaria and dengue while others do not. Using gene drive, they aim to genetically modify mosquitoes to resist the malaria parasite and stop its spread. Their previous workstations couldn’t handle the massive, memory-intensive genomic datasets. After upgrading to the Ampere®-powered System76 Thelio Astra with 128 cores and 512 GB of RAM, their performance improved, enabling faster analysis and accelerated discovery.

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I really love the bio-science use cases for powerful hardware like Ampere. This stuff is always fascinating and having Dr. Nowling on the impact series would be awesome to learn more about this stuff.