KU Bioinformatics Computing Facility Core Renovation and Improvement

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The University of Kansas Lawrence campus requests funding to renovate and expand 3646 gross square feet (gsf) in Nichols Hall designated as the Bioinformatics Computing Facility core (BCF). The renovated space will support computationally intensive multidisciplinary and integrative research projects in the biological and biomedical sciences across many departments of the University and at the KU Medical Center. The BCF supports four dozen NIH projects, two NCRR COBRE grants, a NIGMS Chemical Methodologies and Library Development (CMLD) project, a MLI Specialized Chemistry Center, and ten core service laboratories. These laboratories provide analytical instrumentation and technical services such as molecular interrogation, high throughput screening, microscopy, and biomolecular sequencing to the University's biological and biomedical sciences researchers. The proposed computational commons will be a sustainable, energy efficient data center for hosting existing and future assets dedicated to biological and biomedical computing. Computing is becoming an indispensible component in the biological and biomedical research. Biomedical related computation is driven by three factors: huge and growing amounts of data from instruments such as biomolecular sequencers, mass spectrometry, X-ray crystallography and high throughput screening systems; simulation aimed at understanding the fundamental processes of life at many scales through the development and integration of models of ever greater complexity; and a flood of new questions arising from the availability of data from instruments whose answers depend on modeling and computation. This precisely mirrors our experiences, we have seen a large increase in the number of biological and biomedical science projects that require high performance computing and large scale storage of data. These factors, along with a rapidly expanding computing and storage hardware base that has outgrown the existing facility makes meeting current and future demands of an active biomedical computing community difficult, if not impossible. The proposed renovation will provide the capacity needed to host the computing and storage resources capable of addressing these new challenges in biomedical research through an expanded computing commons. The project will renovate 3646 gsf, including 1232 gsf on the first floor of Nichols Hall as the primary machine room for the existing BCF and additional 2414 gsf as support space. This renovated space, along with additional power, cooling and network bandwidth, will support a high-density computing capacity twenty times greater than what is currently available to BCF users in a highly sustainable and energy efficient design. The proposed renovations will also improve network connectivity between this facility and the rest of the campus, increasing the accessibility of computational resources within and outside the university.