2010 Best Practices Competition IT & Informatics HPC

Published Resources for the Life Sciences
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D. ROI achieved or expected (200 words max.):
Expected returns on this investment are many and include the tangible and intangible benefits and cost
avoidance measures listed below:
Tangible Benefits:
• Cost savings through reduction of people‐hours for IT development, application deployment, system
maintenance, and customer support for centralized implementation (versus distributed
implementations to support labs separately)
Intangible Benefits:
• Improved security/reduced risk by managing a single, centralized pool of infrastructure resources
(includes enterprise‐level security, storage, and back‐up; dedicated virtual LAN; failover/load‐sharing
file services cluster and scheduler; and a single, formal disaster recovery and continuity of operations
plan)
• Increased awareness of bioinformatics resources available to labs at NIAID and other NIH Institutes
• Elevated access to single, integrated team of subject matter experts including system administrators,
infrastructure analysts, bioinformatics developers, and sequence analysis experts
• Enhanced collaboration with research organizations external to NIAID that will take advantage of
high‐performance computing environment
• Improved research productivity to work toward combating/eradicating critical diseases
Cost Avoidance:
• Efficient use of centralized storage and computing resources used at higher capacity
• Leveraged energy efficiency of data center power and cooling systems
• Estimated 5‐fold savings in software licensing fees for shared deployment on cluster
• Limited consolidation and migration costs for systems/data in centralized implementation
E. CONCLUSIONS/implications for the field.
Genomic research is a rapidly growing field with broad implications at the NIAID and in the global
research community in general. Rather than having laboratory staff attempt to develop the requisite
storage, network, and computing capacity themselves, NIAID’s Chief Information Officer has made a
significant investment to centralize infrastructure resources in order to maximize efficiency and minimize
cost and risk. Major network and storage upgrades, in addition to the construction of a powerful and
scalable Linux computing cluster, are the most visible parts of this investment. However, additional
personnel – including an experienced Linux Systems Administrator and bioinformatics support staff –
have also been acquired. By utilizing the centralized infrastructure and resources, researchers doing
important and influential work in immunology, vaccinology, and many other research areas that are
immensely beneficial to the public will be better able to conduct their research.
Large datasets and powerful multi‐core computers are not unique to Next Generation Sequencing. Other
research areas of interest at the NIAID will also benefit from the new high‐performance computing
resources. The NIAID has been able to reuse many of its successful development, procurement, and