Washington University School of Medicine has been at the forefront of genome science since the inception of the field. There is currently over $64 million in annual grant funding to support major sequencing and genome analysis projects at The Genome Center and Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University that address fundamental questions of human health. These projects include sequencing of multiple, complete human genomes from tumor and normal tissues derived from patients with acute myeloid leukemia, lung adenocarcinoma, glioblastoma, serous cystadenocarcinoma, and squamous carcinoma, as well as genomic analysis of complex genetic traits and the human microbiome. Importantly, The Genome Center has embarked on an ambitious and unprecedented project to sequence both normal and tumor genomes from 150 patients, that has the potential to transform diagnosis and treatment of cancer, and are anticipating additional equally ambitious projects being initiated over the next two years. Obtaining sequence data for these projects is becoming cheaper and faster, but the bioinformatics, analysis and data processing and storage requirements are growing at an exponential rate. These projects require enormous computational power and storage, and these essential needs are rapidly outstripping our current data center capacity. Therefore, this application is to request essential funds to expand our current data center to accommodate an additional 120 racks of high-density computing and storage systems. This application is to build a 15,238 building gross square feet (bgsf) data center expansion to support the data storage and processing requirements of The Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine.
