PSC Nets Two HPCwire Awards

by | Nov 17, 2015 | 2015Press

PSC Recognized for Sixth Year in a Row in HPCwire Editor’s Choice, Reader’s Choice Awards

Nov. 17, 2015

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and its collaborators have once again been recognized for excellence in developing and applying HPC technologies to problems of social importance. HPCwire, the leading trade publication for the high performance computing (HPC) community, cited the center’s work for “Best Use of HPC Applications in Life Sciences” and “Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics.” HPCwire announced the awards today at SC15, the international conference of the HPC industry, with more than 12,000 attendees this year. This is PSC’s sixth year in a row of recognition from HPCwire.

 

The HERMES Logistics Modeling Team, consisting of researchers from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC), have used HERMES, their public health product supply chain modeling software, to help the Republic of Benin in West Africa determine how to bring more lifesaving vaccines to its children. The team reported its findings in the journal Vaccine. This marks a seminal achievement in HPC, as the computational modeling directly led the country to redesign its immunization supply chain to lower costs and ensure that illness and death due to vaccine-preventable diseases are averted.

 

20151117 153928The Pittsburgh Genome Resource Repository (PGRR) is a leading-edge information technology resource for storing, accessing and analyzing large de-identified national datasets, including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) from NIH, which are important for personalized medicine. PGRR is funded by the Institute for Personalized Medicine (IPM) and University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) and includes collaboration of faculty and staff from IPM, UPCI, the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI), the University of Pittsburgh Center for Simulation and Modeling (SaM), the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). PGRR provides a portal that allows use of these data easily with tools and HPC resources. As a managed environment, PGRR helps researchers meet information security and regulatory requirements, provides a single consistent view of all datasets, and helps users stay current on updates and modifications made to these datasets. It facilitates the large-scale profiling of TCGA’s 1.1 petabytes of data, consisting of data on tumor samples from 11,000 cancer patients, to better understand genetic pathways and eventually enable personalized cancer treatments.