The interdisciplinary research center stationed at Cornell University that provides IT services for research and education, The Cornell Theory Center (CTC) stated this week that computer consultants had helped design a new computing center and informatics system as part of the Biorepository at the medical research center. The new center located at the Feinstein Center for Medical Research in Manhasset, NY will be a data warehouse and data mining center that will help manage the large amounts of information stored in Cornell’s collection and help more efficiently analyze and process biological specimens.
The Biorepository was built in 1998 and now houses thousands of human samples, including serum, plasma, DNA, cells, tissues and tumors. Accompanying these samples are huge amounts of data attached to important scientific studies. Thanks to expert computer consultants, the process of analyzing and handling these specimens will now be much simpler and provide more detailed information for students and staff.
Those at Cornell have stated that until computer consultants helped design this new data management system, longer studies with huge datasets were nearly impossible to efficiently manage and manipulate. The Feinstein Biorepository informatics system offers a symmetrical multi-processor (SMP) Unisys ES7000 computer that can be expanded to 256 GB of RAM that runs four 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processors that can themselves be increased to 64. This unique system runs Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition R2. Data is stored through four host bus adapters to an EMC CLARIION CX300 RAID disk array. Also part of the computing center is a series of 32-bit applications that run on Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerVault disk arrays. This new system will hopefully offer a much more streamlined data management system than previously was being useed and will help Cornell University fully utilize its cyberinfrastructure resources for both research and education, providing valuable insight to medical experts, university students, professors K-12 outreach programs and other teaching and learning programs attached to the university.
Blogged By: Joshua Feinberg
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