Extramural Research Facilities Improvement Program Data*

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Salk Institute for Biological Studies focuses on fundamental biomedical discoveries aimed at the improvement of human health. Led by 57 faculty members, the Salk receives ~$58 million annually from the NIH in the form of investigator-initiated grant support and research fellowships. The Salk is also a site for training new scientists, currently hosting over 400 postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The traditional strength of the Institute has been in "wet-bench" molecular and genetic research, but the role of computational biology in Salk research is expanding rapidly. Salk investigators now apply increasingly powerful computational approaches to answer an array of research questions, and two new Salk research programs, the Crick-Jacobs Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology and the Razavi-Newman Center for Bioinformatics, tie a core of computational biology to the more traditional bench research efforts. To thrive, these new programs will require a rationally designed and secure computing infrastructure. However, Salk's existing core computing facilities are inadequate. Current facilities arose in a piecemeal fashion to serve individual labs and departments, and they are dispersed throughout the Institute in constrained space with limited power and cooling resources. This application seeks funds to build a new data center and provide an optimal environment for the Institute's core computing equipment. This facility will support Salk's emerging computational biology initiatives and provide for the expanding computational needs of the Institute over the next decades. In turn, this will permit Institute researchers to remain at the forefront of modern biomedical research.