High Performance Computing Cluster for Biomedical Research at VCU - PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT The Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) core facility provides high performance computing resources and user support to 475+ researchers university- wide. The HPRC operates two main computing clusters: athena (general purpose computation) and fenn (biomedical research). The goal of this proposal is to replace the outlived 9-year old fenn cluster with a new state of the art computing cluster that will support ongoing projects and enable new research activities. The new cluster will accomplish the following: 1) renew and expand CPU computing and memory capacity, 2) add GPU computing (unavailable on the current cluster), 3) renew and expand the shared storage system, and 4) upgrade the network connectivity. The new equipment will make a significant impact on more than 38 ongoing NIH-funded projects (including 23 R01s) led by the 21 major and minor users supporting this proposal. The new cluster will meet a rapidly growing demand and need for research computing (98% utilization growth in 2023) in research areas such as genetics, genomics, sequencing, substance use disorders, computational structural biology, bioinformatics, biomaterials, cryo-electron microscopy, molecular modeling and simulation, cancer therapeutics, etc. The HPRC provides computing resources and support to many other faculty labs, core labs, and research centers in the biomedical research area such as the Genomics core, Cryo-EM core, Bioinformatics core, Rodent Behavioral Core, Cohort and Registry Administration Core, Biobehavioral Research Laboratory, Alcohol Research Center, Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, Center for Biomarker Research and Precision Medicine, Center for Biological Data Science, Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research, Center for Microbiome Engineering and Data Analysis, Center for Drug Discovery, Institute of Molecular Medicine, and the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics. By using computational modeling and analysis, researchers can dramatically accelerate their work, reduce the costs for wet-lab experiments, and shorten the period of drug discovery for diseases. A shared computational facility enables an environment to facilitate collaborations between scientists and enhance interdisciplinary and translational research at VCU. Renewed computational resources will also allow us to attract and retrain new investigators in biomedical research at VCU.