This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Shared Instrumentation Grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the grant, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Computational and Systems Biology Initiative at MIT (CSBi) requests funds to purchase a symmetric multi-processing server with storage area network data storage (SMP-SAN) enabling scientists to handle data-intensive computational problems related to a wide variety of Systems Biology projects. This centrally- accessible computational resource is critically required for the immediate progress of several labs engaged in fundamental aspects of biological research. In this proposal, we describe a significant and growing subset of computational biology problems that due to large data sizes cannot be tackled using traditional 32-bit clusters connected to data on network attached storage (NAS) devices. It is our intention to augment the computational resources available in the CSBi High-Performance Computing (HPC) core and the Whitehead-MIT Biolmaging Center with a base configuration of an SMP server containing sixteen 64-bit Itanium2 processors with 64 gigabytes (GB) memory, running a generic 64-bit capable linux operating system (OS), and several terabytes (TBs) of data storage with multiple fiber-channel connections enabling multi-gigabit per second low latency bandwidth. The SMP-SAN will allow researchers to easily collect hundreds of GB to TB of data and directly address the computational needs in two major areas of biology described in this proposal: imaging and proteomics. The projects range from development of imaging technologies to study cellular behavior and non-invasive methods for cancer diagnosis to identifying, understanding and modeling proteins to help in drug discovery and clinical diagnosis. The resource will be located in the Whitehead-MIT Biolmaging Center and integrated with the CSBi HPC resources. The Biolmaging Center and the CSBi HPC Core have extensive experience with management of high-performance computing systems and large data storage systems and are committed to the support and maintenance of the proposed system.
