The National Institute of Health's modernized high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities enable significant innovations in scientific research. NIH's supercomputer Biowulf is the first and largest supercomputer completely dedicated to advancing biomedical research, and produced the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome. Looking to the future, HPC's emerging scientific requirements include compatibility with petabyte-scale data, increased CPU computing, additional storage capacity, and flexibility. To face these challenges, HPC is exploring transformative technologies such as Gen AI and quantum computing to help improve the discovery of scientific research. This presentation will discuss the current state of HPC, limitations within HPC, and future exploration of Gen AI and quantum.
Xavier Soosai
As the Director of the Office of Information Technology Services of the Center for Information Technology (CIT), Soosai oversees ten service areas and the delivery of scientific research and business operations across the institutes and centers (ICs) at NIH. This includes maintaining the high-performance computing environment used by NIH intramural scientists; maintaining NIH’s secure, high-speed network; ensuring the viability and availability of collaboration services, compute hosting and storage services, identity and access management services, service desk support, and more for the NIH community.
Soosai works with CIT leadership and internal service area managers and collaborates with NIH ICs to define scope and provide technical expertise, strategic planning, and leadership for local and enterprise IT projects that drive efficiency and innovation across NIH. Additionally, Soosai is responsible for directing the evaluation and adoption of rapidly evolving technology and forecasting future technology needs.