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.
