The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) and Rutgers University were joined by an act of the State Legislature, effective July 1, 2013. This newly enlarged Rutgers University integrates the medical and dental specialists from UMDNJ into a world-class biomedical research institution. Our researchers across the departments of Medicine, Biology, Genetics, Chemistry, Math, Pharmacology, Biochemistry, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Molecular Biology and Obstetrics are involved in well-funded research projects that have a need for a large computational resource. In total, these researchers have 64 NIH-funded grants with total annual direct costs of > $60M. Many of the investigators are struggling to perform their calculations on the limited computational resources that are currently at our disposal. Other researchers are not able to realize the full potential of their research due to the lack of sufficient computation. For example, some molecular dynamics simulations will produce more realistic results if the system could be modeled for intervals of up to 1 microsecond, but the limit with our current infrastructure is tens of nanoseconds per month for most systems. As another example, genomics researchers have hundreds of exomes and RNA-seq samples that need to be processed and analyzed, but the research is moving at a slow pace due to the bottle-neck of the analysis pipeline. We are proposing a cluster with 2,800 computational cores, 128GB of RAM per compute node and 465TB of storage in a state-of- the-art, energy efficient, cluster configuration. The use, also, of very fast node interconnects (FDR Infiniband) provides the appropriate fabric for problems that are highly scalable, such as molecular dynamics and docking while at the same time supporting the execution of thousands of individual serial jobs. The new computational cluster will enhance the research of our investigators, taking it to levels unattainable with existing resources. This computational cluster will set a new paradigm for a large-scale, centrally managed resource supporting a broad spectrum of biomedical research.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 21 publications
