High Performance Computer for Biomedical Research - Project Summary
The University of Richmond (UR) is a research-intensive predominantly undergraduate
institution (PUI). Our faculty are committed to producing cutting-edge research while also
providing professionally meaningful training to our students. Unusual for a PUI, we currently
have five NIH-funded PIs (major users) working on a variety of important biomedical projects.
These faculty, together with six other faculty (minor users), have leading research programs in
neuroscience, genomics, cancer, osteoporosis, quantitative biology and computational chemistry.
These programs depend on access to compute cycles, but UR does not currently have an
institutionally supported compute resource. Our faculty have been supporting their work using
laptops, desktops, borrowing compute cycles from collaborators, using cloud resources and
supercomputer centers. As the importance of computing in biomedical research increases, this
deficiency is limiting the size and nature of the projects that our faculty can envision and
complete, preventing them from achieving their full potential or engaging students as deeply as
they could. The addition of a nine-node, high-performance, shared computational resource
containing CPUs, GPUs, large amounts of RAM, and RAID-protected storage will enable our
faculty and their students to perform state-of-the-art computations. This hardware will be used
to perform genomic analysis of tick-borne diseases, and to study the evolution of human
demographics and populations. The hardware will also support image and/or video analysis
related to an RNA helicase important in translation, a carbon nanodot drug delivery system, and
the development of a rodent based behavioral model of effort-based rewards. The resource will
also be used for molecular dynamics simulations that will unravel the structure-function
relationship in voltage and non-voltage gated potassium ion channels, RNA helicase, proteins
that mediate cancer progression, the binding affinity of carbon nanodots with mineralized bones,
and amyloid precursor protein with a motor protein, and the design of a novel DNA polymerase.
Access to the requested resource will allow our faculty and students to spend less time waiting
for numerical results and more time formulating important new questions and generating
accurate answers. The innovative research will have a direct impact on human health.
