Message from the Associate Dean

It’s an exceptional time for scientific computing: advances in computing and data technologies coupled with reduced cost have made a new era of scientific discovery possible. Mount Sinai is leveraging these advantages by investing in massive computational and data engines to help tackle some of science’s most difficult questions. Applying expertise from the high performance computing world to help our partner scientists and researchers to learn more about disease, is an extraordinarily satisfying task. As such, Mount Sinai is leading the nation.

Our new 2,200-square-foot data center granted us a unique opportunity to build an on-site supercomputer and data infrastructure in New York City using the latest “green” technologies. This on-site location makes it easy to integrate these new resources with our existing facilities and provides an easier access model for faculty, especially those with large data sets. The size of the new data center empowers us to build an infrastructure of unprecedented size for scientists and researchers at Mount Sinai. With this new infrastructure, researchers can run computer simulations of disease processes with increased fidelity, complexity and scalability.  The Hess Center has made it possible for us to deploy massive computational and data systems that will allow Mount Sinai researchers to tackle scientific problems that are far larger than they have ever been able to tackle before.  

In diabetes and in cancer, Mount Sinai is generating some of the largest data-sets in medicine. On a per-patient basis, Mount Sinai collects several terabytes of data, or 1,000 gigabytes—think 100 DVDs—including the whole genome sequencing of the tumor DNA, DNA from adjacent normal tissue, RNA sequencing in both tissues, and epigenomic profiling. Depending on the type of cancer, these data can be collected on hundreds or thousands of patients, producing petabyte scales of data, or 1,000,000 gigabytes—think 100,000 DVDs.

Just as climate science, for instance, has been revolutionized by simulations run on supercomputers, these machines are also transforming modern medicine. The differences are that in medicine, the data are much more complicated, and there are many more factors at play.

  
Patricia Kovatch 
Associate Dean of Scientific Computing