IU receives $1.5 million from NIH to explore cloud computing for use in health research

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By IU
December 2, 2009

Researchers from the Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center at Indiana University have begun work on an innovative project that will use cloud computing techniques to support life science research. The project is supported by a $1.5 million grant award from the National Institutes of Health and takes advantage of an earlier National Science Foundation grant to Indiana University to construct an experimental supercomputing network called FutureGrid.

"Cloud computing approaches are likely to change the nature of our national research computing infrastructure in the coming years," said Principal Investigator Geoffrey Fox, director of the Digital Science Center and associate dean of research and graduate studies in the IU School of Informatics and Computing. "These technologies hold significant promise in the life sciences and medical sciences as they offer the potential for greater computational power and faster speeds at a lower cost, and in a way that is easier for scientists to use than traditional grid computing approaches."

Technological advances have made medical and biological research increasingly data-rich in recent years -- a trend that scientists believe will continue to accelerate. Processing extremely large sets of digital data that result from gene sequencing and other medical research technologies is a significant challenge that generally cannot be met by a single facility or supercomputer.

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