R&D Facility
At the heart of the Center is our R&D facility, which is currently under development. The R&D facility is the Center's "laboratory," in which new methods can be assembled and then systematically evaluated. For us, R&D involves production level software design and testing, and simulation of data for testing both software and novel statistical or mathematical modeling techniques. An innovative feature of our R&D facility is that it will also include our own molecular laboratory, which will be able to run customized experiments in order to let us apply new methods to carefully controlled real data.
In support of all of this activity, the Center maintains a state-of-the-art parallel computational infrastructure, currently comprising an Apex cluster with 64 computing nodes, powered by either two 2.4GHz Dual-Core or two 2.3Ghz Quad-Core AMD 64-bit Opteron processors, 16GB memory, and an 80GB hard disk; 4TB network storage systems with built-in RAID5 for redundancy; and gigabit network switch. Expansion of this basic system is scheduled at regular intervals as the Center grows. The Center also serves as the Data Coordinating Site for two large, international genetic studies, and maintains a state-of-the-art database infrastructure. The BCMM also draws on the resources of the state-supported Ohio Supercomputing Center, situated near Nationwide Children's on The Ohio State University campus.
Names of Our Servers (and Why)
From the Standards and Nomenclature Committee:
Our main computational cluster is called Levi-Montalcini, or in house we simply say Rita. Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909- ) shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1986 for isolation of nerve growth factor. She won many of the most prestigious scientific awards and was even appointed Senator for Life by her home country of Italy in 2001.
Our database cluster is called Blackwell. Like its namesake, this database cluster represents a series of firsts for the BCMM and The Research Institute in size, scope and configuration. Elizabeth Blackwell (February 3, 182-May 31, 1910) it is said that when her application arrived at Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York, the administrations committee asked the students to decide whether to admit her or not. However, the student body believed it was a joke and voted to admit her; they were shocked when the first female medical student arrived for class. Elizabeth Blackwell graduated first in her class in January, 1849, becoming thereby the first woman to graduate from medical school, the first woman doctor of medicine in the modern era.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) was a pioneering developer of X-ray crystallography, which she used to determine the chemical structures of of such important biomolecules as penicillin and vitamin B12 for which she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.
The name of next internal server will be McClintock. Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) throughout the 1940s and 1950s characterized transposable elements and used this genetic phenomenon to study how genes can act in a binary fashion to affect traits. However, by 1953 journals stopped publishing her work since they suspected it was correct. By the 1970s, the research consensus was on her side as the genetic principles she outlined 15-20 years earlier were validated. She was solely awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for the principle of genetic transposition.
The name of our first external server will be, as we have always planned it to be, Franklin. We want this to be our public server to give her as much posthumous credit as we can. Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958) was an English biophysicist and very talented X-ray crystallographer. Franklin’s work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA which was an important influence on Crick and Watson's 1953 hypothesis regarding the structure of DNA. According to Wikipedia, “Twenty five years after the fact, the first clear recitation of Franklin's contribution appeared as it permeated Watson's account, "The Double Helix,"although it was buried under allegations that Franklin did not know how to interpret her own data and that she should have therefore shared her work with Wilkins, Watson and Crick.” It's pretty clear that she did not get her due in life and was actively oppressed to prevent her from science’s highest honor. A finer candidate for our first public server we cannot think of.
