IT for INGEN

Dedicated supercomputing facilities for the initiative are expected to be provided by expanding IU’s existing IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer, one of the largest supercomputers in the Midwest. An essential feature of this arrangement is that it will be possible periodically to harness the entire power of IU’s supercomputer to attack a single genomics problem, for example, studying the folding patterns of a novel protein.

In addition to supercomputing power, researchers and scientists will need access to three-dimensional visualizations to understand and interpret research results. IU’s experience with visualization will be critical to research that tends to be very visual, from images of single molecules to scans of entire human bodies.

Genomics research relies on access to databases and specialized resources worldwide. IU’s leadership in high performance networking, particularly its connection to and involvement in the Internet2 Abilene network and international connections linking the United States with Asia, Europe, Russia and Latin America, will greatly facilitate access to these resources and collaboration with experts worldwide.

Large sets of genetic data and ever-growing stores of human patient data will be integral to the research. IU’s high performance storage system was built to support data-intensive computing in medicine, biology, chemistry and a variety of other academic disciplines.

The system has massive storage capacity and can retrieve any piece of data in a matter of seconds.

Five full-time staff members will be dedicated to INGEN—two supporting supercomputing applications, one supporting large-scale databases and two supporting advanced visualization.