A few years ago at a MacWorld party, I spotted a guy I knew and barged in while he was talking to someone else. “Have you got a story for me?” I asked. He came back with a few suggestions, each less newsworthy than the last. His former conversation partner stood by in silence. Then Mr. no-news said, “Wait a minute: this guy runs the largest Mac supercomputer in the world!”
That guy was Brian Gupton, one of the brains behind the DataseamGrid in Kentucky featured in this week’s magazine. We talked for a couple of hours, lost in conversation in the middle of a party. I liked him immediately on a personal level: here’s a guy from a blue-collar background who is hugely passionate about education. And it turned out he had built this gigantic supercomputer that was trawling through massive amounts of data in the search for a cancer cure.
There were so many strands to the story.
At the time we met, there were two promising cancer drugs in the works. One of them appeared to be almost 100 percent effective at eradicating stage IV carcinomas. I remember being completely flabbergasted: “Are you sure no one has written about this?” His answer was even more astonishing: only local press had picked up the story.
I was amazed that he’d managed to build a world-class research tool in a place that was being decimated by the declining coal industry. It was a public/private partnership, and an early example of utility computing – this was before cloud computing had taken off. Another fascinating detail: some of the drugs they were exploring were being grown in genetically modified tobacco plants.
Gupton and his partners built the supercomputer with Apple’s Xgrid, a software package for distributed computing which, at the time, came built into OS X. This meant that anybody could build their own supercomputer. And it meant that universities, schools, research centers could potentially become these powerful grids, following in Dataseam’s footsteps. (Apple has since removed Xgrid from Snow Leopard, making that less possible.) Many school districts buy iPads for kids now, favoring one-on-one computing without desktops. Yet Gupton is as passionate as ever and the researchers are still bullish, saying it’s the largest cancer drug pipeline in the country.
Today, the Grid hums as researchers look for chemicals to disrupt or inhibit the growth of cancer. Based on the modeling techniques that won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry they’ve built a simulator that takes a 3D model of a cancer protein and matches it against a molecular model of a chemical, working with a library of 20 million chemicals.
This supercomputer on a shoestring is still going strong.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
