High Performance Computing

Our mission is to accelerate scientific discovery at Mount Sinai by providing researchers with scalable high performance computational and data infrastructure. Use the Minerva Supercomputer to perform large computing jobs and run large applications to advance your science.

Accelerating Discoveries for Researchers

Minerva enables researchers to ask and answer new scientific questions. The Minerva Supercomputer is now an essential part of over 2,000 workflows and accelerates progress to expand our field of biomedical knowledge. This has translated into new understanding and new therapies for a wide spectrum of disease categories including autism, cancer progression, insulin resistance in diabetics, cardiac care, and psychiatry, to name but a few. Minerva is utilized for over $100 million in funding from the National Institute of Health.

Minerva Supercomputer

Named for the Roman goddess of wisdom and medicine, Minerva was introduced at the Icahn School of Medicine in 2012. With over 2 petaflops of computational power, Minerva utilizes 24,214 Intel Platinum in three generations including 8358 2.6 GHz, 8268 2.9 GHz and 8168 2.7GHz compute cores (48 cores or 64 cores per node with two sockets in each node), 92 nodes with 1.5TB of memory per node, 353 nodes with 192 GB of memory per node, 48 V100 GPUs, 40 A100 GPUs, 8 H100 GPUs, 210 terabytes of total memory, 350 terabytes of solid-state storage, 32 petabytes of parallel file system storage and uses IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS) because it has advantages that are specifically useful for this workload—such as parallel metadata, tiered storage, and sub-block allocations. Minerva has contributed to over 1,500 peer-reviewed publications in ten years.

Access to Minerva is open to all at the Mount Sinai Health System. Read our quick start guide to access Minerva, and request an account to begin computing.

Minerva: Optimized for Researchers

Through continual refinement and optimization, we continue to create a computational and data ecosystem that is responsive, reliable, and efficient. We gather valuable input through our regular Minerva Town Halls, our Scientific Advisory Board, 1:1 meetings and training sessions.Through the process of benchmarking the system and engaging in dialogue with our users, Minerva is finely-tuned to the needs of research workflows.

Selected Science Enabled by High Performance Computing

The Filizola Lab has harnessed the power of HPC, using Minerva, to create increasingly more complex molecular models and simulations. computer-modeled molecular dynamics for opioid receptors. Researchers have devoted special attention to opioid receptors, which are important drug targets for pain management, drug abuse/addiction, and mood disorders.

The Seaver Center for Autism conducts research studies aimed at understanding the multiple causes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Scientific Computing helps researchers conduct large scale sequencing and data analysis on a level that would not have been possible only a few years ago. In a recent study, researchers demonstrated that postzygotic mutations (e.g., sporadic genetic lesions that occur very early during embryonic development) are important factors contributing to ASD risk. This study was cited as one of the most important advances in autism in 2017 by a federal advisory committee, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee.

Read more about incredible research conducted through High Performance Computing at Mount Sinai.