Addition of a High-Performance Compute Capacity to Support UWCCC and ICTR Cores in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics

Description:

The Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics (BMI) operates multiple research cores as part of its mission-critical task to support biostatistics, bioinformatics and other biomedical data science activity throughout the School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH) and the UW more broadly. These cores respond to the longstanding and ever-present demand for expertise in study design and data analysis. These cores also share computational infrastructure that is maintained and operated by the BMI Biomedical Computing Group (BCG).

This project will deliver increased computational speed for the analysis of large biomedical data sets. It leverages the file-server/compute-server organization of existing infrastructure and provides specific ways to increase the storage capacity and throughput of computations on data. Modern datasets can be very large, and keep getting larger over time, and therefore require a compute infrastructure with increasingly powerful equipment.

This project helps fund file server replacement and upgrading of file server drives which are nearing the end of their useful lives. This significantly expands storage capacity and throughput without having to make more substantial infrastructure changes. The project also updates the compute file server to solid-state drives (SSDs) that are much faster than conventional hard drives. This will be especially useful for genomics projects that must process enormous datasets quickly. Finally, the project will replace and update the existing dedicated compute servers to high-speed dedicated compute servers, which will allow for the high-speed data processing required by faculty and staff for their compute-intensive work with large, complex data sets.

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR:

Michael Newton, professor of biostatistics and medical informatics

CO-PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR:

William Annis, director of the biomedical computing group

CO-INVESTIGATORS:

Irene Ong, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and biostatistics and medical informatics

Menggang Yu, professor of biostatistics and medical informatics

Roxana Alexandridis, senior scientist in biostatistics and medical informatics

Colin Dewey, professor of biostatistics and medical informatics

CORE:

Biostatistics and Medical Informatics Shared Research Cores and BMI Biomedical Computing Group