NSF MRI Grant Awarded

An NSF MRI grant has been awarded to the University of Notre Dame under the direction of Dr. Mark Alber for support of establishing a Beowulf type Biocomplexity Cluster to provide computer infrastructure for The Notre Dame Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Biocomplexity (ICSB)  to meet its broad research and educational goals. The Biocomplexity Cluster will be added to the existing BoB cluster (http://bob.nd.edu) at the University of Notre Dame. Its addition to this high performance computing facility will be embedded in the administrative structures of the Science Computation Facilities (SCF) at Notre Dame.  Establishment of the Cluster will result in dramatic increase in the range and complexity of the biological computations on Notre Dame campus.

The ICSB supports the development of quantitative predictive models of biological processes ranging from subcellular to multicellular and ecological. The unique aspects of the ICSB are its interdisciplinary approach, its pursuit of complex biological systems at all scales simultaneously, and its insistence that modeling and quantitative experiments develop jointly. The Biocomplexity Cluster will help ICSB in supporting a variety of projects, which require a high-end computational environment. These projects: Molecular Dynamics, Multiscale Simulation of Avian Limb Development, Microscale Modeling of Cancellous Bone Damage and Environmental Biocomplexity- cover all interacting scales of Biocomplexity phenomena from molecular to environmental. New collaborations with groups working on Biological Networks and Modeling of Cytoskeleton will also greatly benefit from the Cluster. 25% of the CPU time of the Cluster will be accessible to other researchers in the Colleges of Science and Engineering.

During the academic year up to 5% of the computer time will be allocated for teaching purposes. The Cluster will also allow students participating in the Summer REU programs on Notre Dame campus to learn and apply high-end computational techniques as a part of their training. Interactive web pages will be developed with separate sections aimed at junior-high and high school students to provide educational materials on Biocomplexity, which will utilize the Cluster.

The interdisciplinary study of Biocomplexity incorporates quantitative modeling into biology and related disciplines, and thus has broad impact on diverse fields such as Biology, Geology, Environmental Engineering, Life Sciences, Computer Science, and Mathematics. The Biocomplexity Cluster will be used to support interdisciplinary research projects and coursework, helping to train a new generation of students in the integration of interdisciplinary biological experimentation and modeling. Collaboration of ICSB with the newly established Indiana University Biocomplexity Institute at Bloomington and the Indiana University Medical School at Indianapolis, formalized as the Indiana Biocomplexity Consortium, will ensure broad impact through student exchange, development of new educational initiatives, and development of additional collaborative research projects. The Cluster will help the ICSB in achieving one of its major goals of  developing new computational techniques and tools of broad utility to bioscientists and distributing these freely to researches within the scientific community.