ARCHIVED: At IU, what is the Advanced Information Technology Core?

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Introduction

The Advanced Information Technology Core (AITC) is a collaboration between the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) and University Information Technology Services (UITS) at IU. It is also an official IUSM Core. The AITC is positioned to deliver the advanced information technologies of the Research Technologies (RT) division of UITS to IUSM researchers. As a liaison between researchers and RT services, this Core has the goal of providing information technology solutions to problems confronted by IUSM research labs and to partner in innovative approaches to medical research. In particular, it helps IUSM researchers accomplish research and compete in spite of the exponential growth and increasing complexity of research data, the need for orders of magnitude increase in computational power for analysis, and requirements for robust and scalable applications for dissemination and participation in consortia.

Services offered by the AITC

Storage of critical research data:
- Central storage of working data that can be made visible on computers distributed around the lab or campus. All data are backed up daily.
- Free archival storage of up to 10 terabytes of data per project. All data are replicated between Bloomington and Indianapolis.
High performance computing:
- Star-P software to speed up Matlab analyses 10- to 100-fold on the Research Technologies division's parallel computing infrastructure
- Supercomputers for computational and data-intensive analyses such as BLAST, image analysis, and gene or protein analyses
Visualization:
- Equipment, software, and technical expertise to display medical information in two, three, and four dimensions
Virtual servers:
- Virtual servers housed, maintained, and backed up by UITS, with a 99.99% uptime guarantee, over which a department or group has complete control
Management, analysis, and dissemination of research data:
- Creation of information workflows that allow easy, standards-based data entry, management, analysis, and dissemination of research data through web environments. These environments can grow with projects as researchers bring in national or international collaborators.
Access to national computational grid environments:
- Active participation in the TeraGrid and other national cyberinfrastructure facilities; a doorway to the use of these as either a resource provider or consumer
Strategic partnering in grant solicitation:
- Partnering with you; AITC has an established record of making research more competitive and productive, and bringing to bear the advantages of a major university technology program to provide an advantage.

Unique features of AITC services

The IU School of Medicine has a number of units, such as Information Services and Technology Management (ISTM), the Bioinformatics Core within the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, the Biostatistics Core in the Division of Biostatistics, and individual departmental or research groups, that supply information technology services and support. However, only the AITC has the capacity to deliver advanced IT services at scale. In other words, the AITC is equipped to handle:

Terabytes, even petabytes (a thousand terabytes = a million gigabytes) of storage
Teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) of computing cycles
Databases that can accommodate terabytes of data
High-end visualization hardware and software

The AITC can also leverage UITS' production services infrastructure (climate-controlled data center with 24x7 service/hardware monitoring, 24x7 hardware and software support, 24x7 problem escalation, off-site backups, etc.).

Advantages of using AITC services

The AITC represents a group of professional IT staff within IU's Research Technologies (RT) division with many years of experience helping researchers with their supercomputing, massive data storage, and visualization needs. While some or all of these services may be available at a lab or departmental level, using the services of the AITC offers several distinct advantages:

AITC systems are hosted in professionally maintained, air-conditioned, physically secure data centers, with 24x7 operational support and problem escalation.
AITC solutions are robust and scalable, and are developed in a rigorous environment that will ensure continued functionality as your data grow, standards evolve, and usage models change.
AITC can store and archive massive data sets that cannot be managed reliably in a laboratory. As storage media ages and evolves, AITC is committed to ensuring seamless access to your data while continually evaluating and embracing new storage technologies (meaning that data will be migrated continuously, automatically, and without any action on your part while we innovate.) Such high reliability will ensure that the data are protected now and will continue to be protected in the future.
AITC supercomputing systems can handle computationally and data intensive analyses, likely far beyond the reach of lab or departmental computers.
Visualization labs at IUPUI permit novel data exploration and dissemination using techniques such as virtual reality, 3D imaging, and others that employ the highest-end hardware available today.
RT is a national leader in grid computing and national supercomputing alliances such as the TeraGrid.

Contact information

If you'd like to use the services of the AITC, contact the Core director, Bill Barnett ( barnettw@indiana.edu , 812-361-3369) or the Core project analyst Anurag Shankar ( ashankar@iupui.edu , 812-325-8629).

For further information about the AITC and the services it offers, visit the AITC web site.

This work is supported in part by the Indiana Genomics Initiative. The Indiana Genomics Initiative of Indiana University is supported in part by Lilly Endowment, Inc.

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Last modified on November 04, 2010.