CSB awarded NIH S10 grant

Posted by daviskd2 on Tuesday, July 5, 2022 in News.

Jarrod Smith, research associate professor of biochemistry, successfully submitted an S10 proposal to purchase twenty GPU compute nodes, each consisting of four NVIDIA “A6000” GPUs and 64 Intel “Platinum” CPU cores, and has received an award of nearly $600,000. This will be combined with up to $100,000 in matching funds from the VU Basic Sciences office of the dean to make a $700,000 investment to accelerate computationally-intensive structural biology applications in the areas of cryo-EM, artificial intelligence (e.g. AlphaFold), molecular dynamics and others.  This system will be installed and supported by ACCRE, in close association with our joint CSB/ACCRE systems administrator, Sai Medury.

The timeline for delivery and installation of these new machines is not yet clear. Investigators in need of GPU-computing resources in the meantime are encouraged to take advantage of the Turing nodes, graciously made available by Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of physics and astronomy. In 2021, the CSB installed SSD scratch storage on 20 of Dr. Bockelmann’s nodes, enabling accelerated GPU workflows for RELION and AlphaFold on shared resources.

For more information about these resources, please contact Jarrod Smith directly.

As always, these types of grants are a team effort and would not be possible without the exciting research programs of the S10 users. Contributing PIs include: (Biochemistry) Walter Chazin, Yi Ren, Chuck Sanders, Will Wan; (Biological Sciences) Brand Eichman, Lauren Jackson; (Chemistry) Clare McCabe, Jens Meiler, John Yang; (Medicine) Ray Blind, Christine Lovly; (MPB) Hassane Mchaourab, Teru Nakagawa; (PMI) James Crowe, Borden Lacy; (Pharmacology) Tina Iverson; (CDB) QJ Zhou.

Congratulations to the team!