High Performance Computing and Machine Learning Infrastructure for Oregon Life Sciences

Project Summary/Abstract Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) requests funds for the “High Performance Computing and Machine Learning Infrastructure for Oregon Life Sciences” to refresh outdated equipment and expand existing hardware resulting in a 39% net increase in memory and 183% increase in GPUs. Exacloud, the current high-

performance computing (HPC) infrastructure at OHSU and Knight Cancer Institute was first installed in 2014 and expanded in subsequent years. The improvements will meet current demands, support recent NIH-funded growth in quantitative sciences, leverage the shared expertise of computational researchers at OHSU, and

meet institutional needs at least until 2026. This proposal serves 61 life sciences research groups in the Portland area, 43 of which are actively funded by NIH and 26 are presented here as Major or Minor users who are listed as Contact PI on NIH grants totaling more than $33 million in annual funding. The scientific use

cases for this computational platform include cancer, diabetes, infectious disease, genomics, radiomics, artificial intelligence, and modelling research. Overall, NIH research projects with over $89 million in annual NIH funding are listed in this proposal which would directly benefit from the improved system.

The current OHSU Exacloud operates a 282-node, 9176-core high-performance computing (HPC) cluster. 36% of the current hardware is end-of-life, slowing OHSU research. We seek funds to purchase 102 nodes with 768 GB memory each (3264 cores and 176 GPUs). After discontinuing 127 nodes we will leverage the existing

Exacloud infrastructure to create a 257 node/8888 core cluster with 282 GPUs that can accommodate 15% annual growth in computing and data intensive science for OHSU users as the new CPU cores are 86% faster than the equipment they will replace. This resource will enable open science, support cross-institutional

collaboration, and manage increased demands on computational resources leveraging shared OHSU / Knight research needs and OHSU shared services computational expertise. OHSU and the Knight Cancer Institute and achieve more than $330 million of NIH funding per year. The Knight Cancer Institute is the only Oregon-based NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center with innovative

research, including Computational Biology and Machine Learning. OHSU performs high-impact global research as a preeminent research university in Oregon and is 12th among American research universities in generating new patents. OHSU investigators use innovative tools such as machine learning, genomics, and mathematical

modeling to address important high-impact health concerns including cancer, infectious diseases, diabetes, and dementia. The improved Exacloud will support this vibrant life science research community and provide a platform for health-focused innovations.