Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a leading research institute that is engaged in a wide range of basic science studies focused on fundamental biomedical problems. These include leading programs in various aspects of cancer biology, neuroscience, human genetics, genomics and epigenetics. CSHL has also recently started a new multidisciplinary research program in quantitative biology in recognition of the need to integrate large data sets from such diverse areas as nucleic acid sequence analysis and neural imaging. All of these research areas are being transformed by large biological data sets resulting from recent dramatic increases in data acquisition rates including in nucleic acid sequencing, imaging, and proteomics. Further, every indication is that the rate of data acquisition will continue to increase exponentially for the next several years and beyond. Analyzing these large data sets, now a fundamental component of almost all areas of biomedical research is dependent on large-scale computational resources. The requested 54-node scientific compute cluster is essential for CSHL to capitalize on these large data sets and use them to understand basic processes impacting health and disease. Specifically, many of the computational analyses carried out by CSHL researches have significant memory requirements, but the current infrastructure at CSHL does not have adequate numbers of high memory nodes to perform these crucial analyses in a timely fashion, or in some cases, perform them at all. The requested cluster would be one component, dedicated to human biomedical research, in an overall plan to address this need.
