The new supercomputer and grant will provide powerful computing resources to support the university's studies in bioinformatics and evolutionary studies, he said. Ecologists and epidemiologists use mathematical models to trace the relationships among populations of plants and animals, including disease organisms. The goal is to sort through complicated or patchy information to understand links between individuals and groups. Examples range from the evolution and spread of infectious diseases to invasions of exotic species like weeds, Krone and Joyce noted. This backward-looking approach is called coalescent theory.
Diversity is one general question that's at the bottom of a lot of things.
Looking at coalescent theory is one way to calculate the amount of diversity in a population. Joyce and Krone's interest is in the probability and statistical models that can be used to trace such relationships. Using mathematical methods to track genes while accounting for natural selection and other forces is complicated and fraught with randomness. The same sorts of complexity and randomness that is part of biological evolution also holds sway for the computer programs Foster is interested in. The age of high-performance computing once symbolized by supercomputers costing millions of dollars apiece, may be closer to home than we think, a University of Idaho computer scientist says.