Microsoft Research and the Ragon Institute have collaborated on a new way to fight HIV. Microsoft researcher David Heckerman catalogs fragments of HIV that are vulnerable to attack by the immune system. The amount of data generated is enormous, but by using thousands of Microsoft machines working in parallel, researchers are able to make computations in a matter of hours that would take years on a single computer.

“When we first met Bruce, he had a very tricky problem to analyze,” remembers David Heckerman. “He had this great data set but he didn’t know how to analyze it. We happened to have just the right algorithm for it and this large bank of computers at Microsoft that could do this massive amount of computation. He gave us the problem on Friday. On Monday, we had a completed analysis for him.”

In this video, Dr. Bruce Walker and David Heckerman, Distinguished Scientist, Microsoft Research, explain that as our immune system tries to block HIV, the virus mutates to evade the immune system but why there is reason for optimism.

Learn more at Microsoft Research