Friday, May 9, 2025
5/9/2025
Community Project Funding/Congressionally Directed Spending - Construction - This construction project will occur at Meharry Medical College, a black academic medical center, which is located in both a federally designated Opportunity Zone and Promise Zone in the heart of Nashville, TN. The construction and equipment purchased through this award will provide a supercomputer cluster for Meharry’s new School of Applied Computational Sciences (SACS). This will allow Meharry SACS to complement and transform the education, research, and clinical training of Meharry’s existing Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, and Graduate Studies. Meharry’s SACS will merge the strengths of one of the nation’s leading Historically Black Medical Schools to extend its impact on health equity even further and to unlock the life-changing possibilities that data science brings to healthcare and biomedical research. This project will also support master’s degree curricula in computer science and data science, and in biomedical data science along with the PhD-level curricula in biomedical data science at Meharry. These programs were established to help address the national shortage of underrepresented minorities in the data and computing profession is a direct consequence of the fact that current national programs do not consistently attract enough students from these populations. Specifically, this project addresses an urgently needed strategy for increasing research and educational opportunities for African American data scientists, while ensuring that those who develop health solutions are representative of the populations they study. The supercomputer cluster consists of two clusters. Cluster 1 consists of 12 high-performance computing nodes capable of processing intensive genomics datasets and distributed computing. Cluster 2 consists of 4 GPU nodes good for deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (MI), image analysis, mathematical operations, 3-D structures, modeling, drug discovery, and parallel processing. Both clusters have one common log in node and one management node. The storage solution contains approximately 1.76 Petabyte to support the storage and access of data and intermediate files.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).