High Performance Computing (HPC) technology has been essential to many areas of biomedical research. The Center for Human Genetics (CHG) at Duke University Medical Center has been one of the leading groups in the mapping and identification of genes leading to human disease. Like others, our efforts have followed closely the technical advancements in computing and molecular biology that have occurred over the past 20 years. With the success of the Human Genome Project, whole new areas of investigation involving common, complex diseases are now possible. However, like the diseases under study, the analyses in these exciting areas of research are becoming increasingly complex. Specifically, as we develop new statistical methods for genetic analysis and expand our clinical and bioinformatics resources, we are at the stage where we require the speed and power of a multiprocessor midrange computer for the storage, analysis and visualization of our data. The huge amount of data now available requires the ability to pipe this data from database queries directly into computationally intensive analysis programs. However, because of the sensitive nature of patient data, exporting this data to external computer systems for analysis is fraught with security problems. Towards this end, we are requesting funds to purchase a SunMicrosystems SunFire 6800 featuring twenty-four 750Mhz processors, 72 GB memory and 3 terabytes of disk storage. This HPC will provide the database storage capacity and querying speed plus the computational processing capability needed to analyze our clinical, genotypic, and bioinformatics data.
