Researchers at CUIMC now have access to one of the fastest and most powerful computer clusters in academia dedicated to biomedical research after a recent upgrade of the High Performance Computing Cluster in the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2).
The upgrade replaced all the cluster's old processors with new CPUs and GPUs that run 10 to 100 times faster, depending on the job, and added storage units with increased memory and faster data transfer rates. Despite added computational power of each node, the costs for most of the center's computing services have decreased.
Vinod Gupta, director of IT in the Department of Systems Biology and C2B2, who runs the cluster, hosted an online open house this past fall to introduce the new cluster to researchers across the medical center campus.
"As the analysis of biomedical data becomes more complex and utilizes artificial intelligence, desktop computing can only accomplish so much," Gupta says. What can take weeks for a desktop computer to process can take mere minutes with the center's high-performance processors. "Since our upgrade, interest in using the resource is growing and the number of new users on campus is rising rapidly," Gupta says.
Since its inception in 2003, the High Performance Computer Cluster has supported the work of more than 100 labs at CUIMC with millions of CPU-hours of processing. The center's computers have supported researchers studying the how cancer progresses, predicting the interactions of viruses with their human hosts, and uncovering the brain circuits involved in common psychiatric disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia.
"With the upgrades, this resource should take us into a new era of research," Gupta said.
On-site advantages
In addition to enhanced computing power, the center's engineers provide CUIMC researchers with valuable advice and assistance around the clock, services typically unavailable at commercial computing centers.
"People can go to the cloud, but that can be quite expensive, and it can be very time-consuming to manage for researchers without a lot of IT experience," says Michael Faucher, director of research IT and computing at CUIMC. Researchers using cloud services can easily overpay for expensive storage, for example, if they do not carefully monitor their needs as jobs are launched, processed, and completed.
"Experienced engineers know how to keep costs down and how much computer power is needed for a particular job," Faucher adds. "Vinod and his team are well versed in the technologies and analysis programs that researchers need and want. They know how to advise researchers to get the job done while keeping costs to a minimum."
More planned upgrades
Additional upgrades to the facility are planned for the coming months. The rooms that house the cluster will soon be hardened to further protect the equipment, while the center's engineers work to secure HIPAA certification to offer access to researchers analyzing clinical data.
The center has space to double its capacity and may add more capacity soon to accommodate growing demand.
Networking is a key connector among researchers who need to share massive amounts of data produced at labs inside and outside CUIMC. "We've also talked about how we can partition our network for research data," Vinod says. "Instead of transferring data via the internet, we're working on having a dedicated, high-speed autobahn on campus between the user and the center." That connection may become available next year.
Jim Bossio, CUIMC's chief of information technology, says other upgrades are planned over time, and the computer center will be supported centrally by the Office for Research to maintain the resource.
"This data center is an asset to the entire university, and I think we're going to be rewarded with a lot of scientific breakthroughs," says Bossio.
References
Additional information
The recent upgrades to the High Performance Computing cluster were supported by a grant from the NIH (S10OD032433), funding from the Department of Systems Biology, and leadership of Despina Kontos, inaugural chief research information officer at CUIMC, Jim Bossio, chief information officer at CUIMC and Mike Faucher, inaugural director of research information technology and computing at CUIMC.
Top photo from Getty Images.
