Our genomics-based scientists and their external collaborators are at a critical point in their research: now, and increasingly over the next years, their discoveries will be limited by the quantity and quality of computing and storage that they can access. While Mount Sinai has funded an excellent supercomputing and storage infrastructure along with professional staff to operate and maintain it, it has been a runaway success and it is now under-provisioned, negatively impacting its largest group of users the greatest: the genomics-based researchers. The scientific productivity of these researchers is greatly inhibited on this existing infrastructure due to long queue wait times especially during critical periods compounded by the extraordinary amount of time spent managing their data storage due to a substantial under-supply. With the explosion of progressively complex scientific and data queries planned by the 20 PIs, their 24 projects and their 55 external collaborating institutions comprising over $43 million in NIH funding, these limited resources are severely restricting the ability of the researchers to collaborate and to share their data with the broader scientific community. To enable these researchers instead to flourish, we propose a """"""""Big Omics Data Engine"""""""" (BODE) instrument: a dedicated, specialized data analytic supercomputer customized for Mount Sinai's specific scientific needs. Such an instrument will increase their throughput by at least 3X and up to 10X by using 2,484 Intel Haswell enterprise cores. The available storage space will expand by over 3X to 5 petabytes, thus greatly enhancing the genomics-based research in a spectrum of disease categories including autism, insulin resistance in diabetics, schizophrenia and related behavioral disorders, cardiac care, the origins of drug addiction and depression, and cancer progression. Moving the genomics researchers to a new machine will also have the secondary effect of freeing up compute cycles and storage on our existing supercomputer for our next highest demand group of users: the structural and chemical biology researchers. In recognition of the intense scientific need for this instrument, Mount Sinai has agreed to fund up to $4 million in operating costs.
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