Rare Resource for Vital Work
Anton® 2 Supercomputer
When biomedical scientists across the nation need supercomputing heft to shed light on problems as different as how fish oil delivers health benefits, how viruses package their DNA for future infections, or how brain membrane proteins regulate nerve-cell signals, they have a powerhouse partner at the ready. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint computational research center of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, has been at the forefront of powering research for decades. Among its resources is Anton® 2, a special-purpose supercomputer designed for cutting-edge molecular simulations. Anton 2 is provided at no cost by D. E. Shaw Research and operationally funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PSC’s Anton 2 is the only machine found outside D. E. Shaw Research’s own facilities.
PSC also is a prominent institution in the groundbreaking NIH-funded Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP). HuBMAP researchers are developing an open framework to map the molecular landscape of healthy cells in the human body to better understand the relationship between cellular organization and health. They use the latest single-cell and imaging methods to create atlases of healthy tissues that serve as a reference to help understand what goes wrong earlier in disease progression.
PSC leads the program’s infrastructure and engagement component, known as HIVE-IEC. It’s co-led by PSC scientific director Phil Blood and Pitt’s Jonathan Silverstein, professor and chief research informatics officer in Pitt’s Department of Biomedical Informatics.
In July, a set of nine scientific papers was published in the Nature family of journals and the journal Cell Reports, describing breakthroughs in areas ranging from kidney disease to uterine/fetal interactions, using high resolution, multiscale, and multimodal mapping of the human body. Silverstein is a co-author of one of the papers. The papers are part of a larger group of papers presenting the first collection of maps created by researchers in the HuBMAP consortium.
“The PSC team is the glue that keeps the whole consortium operating and moving forward,” says James Barr von Oehsen, PSC director and Pitt vice chancellor for research computing. “Clinicians will be able to use HuBMAP as a reference map for research. Like all PSC computing resources, HuBMAP is a data and tool resource for the Pitt research community and researchers around the world.”
Anton® 2 is a registered trademark of D. E. Shaw Research, LLC.