Dell Technologies Inc. has gifted the University of Pittsburgh a high-performance computing system with a total of 9,672 gigaflops of power to enable medical research. The high-powered computing system has the potential to make 9.7 trillion computations per second.
“The computational power provided by the Dell system will support hundreds of researchers aiming to leverage the exponentially growing amounts of scientific and patient data to advance understanding of human health and disease,” Pitt School of Medicine Dean Anantha Shekhar said in a prepared statement.
The World Economic Forum estimates hospitals produce an average 50 million gigabytes of data a year and that 97% of that data has gone unused. Now, researchers are able to use complex computer systems to analyze this data for previously unnoticeable patterns. Computing power remains an essential need in the tech sector as artificial intelligence technologies continue to grow and develop.
“By using high-performance computing, we can create a health care system that learns,” Institute for Precision Medicine Director Adrian Lee said in a prepared statement. “With this, we can accelerate advances in care, which could directly lead to shorter, more effective treatments with better outcomes leading to improved quality of life.”
The computing system will be used for multiple fields of research, including cancer and Alzheimer’s. The primary cancer research will be breast cancer research.
“This gift initially will serve as a blueprint for using computational resources to attack all diseases that strike humankind,” Pitt Vice Chancellor Mark Henderson said in a prepared statement. “Finding new uses for this system is only limited by our imagination.”
The new system will support the Innovation Hub for Health Science Medical Research, a collaboration between Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and UPMC.
“We are making Pittsburgh the epicenter for computationally enabled health and precision medicine,” said Joseph Yun, research professor of electrical and computer engineering, in a prepared statement. “This type of infrastructure will truly accelerate our research.”
