ACCELERATE: LIFE SCIENCES - University of Miami’s Center for Computational Science Correlates Viruses with Gastrointestinal Cancers for The Cancer Genome Atlas 400% Faster Using DDN Storage

The Center for Computational Science (CCS) at the University of Miami is one of the largest centralized, academic, cyber infrastructures in the country. It supports over 2,000 researchers, faculty, staff, and students across multiple disciplines on diverse and interdisciplinary projects requiring high performance computing (HPC) resources. The center's guiding principle is to manage the entire data lifecycle as seamlessly as possible to streamline research workflow. However, the center faced several challenges. The diverse, interdisciplinary research projects required massive compute and storage power as well as integrated data lifecycle movement and management. The explosion of next-generation sequencing had a major impact on compute and storage demands, as it’s now possible to produce more and larger datasets, which often create processing bottlenecks. The heavy I/O required to create four billion reads from one genome in a couple of days only intensifies when the data from the reads needs to be managed and analyzed. The center needed a powerful file system that was flexible enough to handle very large parallel jobs as well as smaller, shorter serial jobs.

The University of Miami maintains one of the largest centralized, academic, cyber infrastructures in the country, which is integral to addressing major scientific challenges and solving many of today's most challenging problems. At its Center for Computational Science (CCS), more than 2,000 researchers, faculty, staff and students across multiple disciplines collaborate on diverse and interdisciplinary projects requiring high performance computing (HPC) resources. The Center provides hardware, software development and analytics expertise to support a variety of research areas, including genomics, computational biology, marine ecosystems, ocean modeling, climate and meteorology, computational economics, computational fluid dynamics as well as social systems informatics. According to Dr. Nicholas Tsinoremas, director of the Center for Computational Science at the University of Miami as well as a professor of medicine, computer science and health informatics, the center was founded on the premise that data drives discovery. Therefore, keeping pace with data growth is of paramount importance.