Dr Stratos Efstathiadis, Technical Director of the High Performance Computing Facility, describes the facility’s primary activities: “Our facility captures massive amounts of data from Next-Generation sequencers, microscopes, slide scanners, mass spectrometers and other research instruments. It must store, curate, support and enable the analysis of this data, and also provide resources scientists can use to run simulations and generate models.

These analysis and simulation jobs often need to run for days, or even weeks. Thus, although the facility is one of the largest of its kind for a medical center, occasionally there is a need for additional computing resources so researchers can analyze data more quickly.

Even more problematic than the time it takes to analyze data is the time it takes to transfer it. Efstathiadis says, “Transferring data is a large bottleneck; our datasets are extremely large, and it often takes more time to move the data than to generate it. Since our collaborators are all over the world, if we can’t move it they can’t use it.”