SM: While you manage the research infrastructure, are you also managing a lot of data that comes from these affiliated hospitals such as Massachusetts General or other partner hospitals?

MA: We do have lot of data that needs to be managed; it is almost close to petabytes of data. Most of it is coming from next-generation sequencers, high-resolution imaging, and while folks at the hospital use high-performance computing, it is not fully set up for the HIPAA data. So, they can’t bring in patient data, but they can bring over basic science data like genetics data.

SM: I see. Given that context can you help me understand what is your organization activity in the realm of cloud computing?

MA: The primary business of HMS is research. We get in the order of close to a billion dollars in research funding when it comes to the medical school. I call the med school a land of thousand CIOs because each individual lab can pretty much set up however it wants to set up its high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. In order for this research to be more efficient, we looked at cloud computing. It is not efficient for everyone to deploy infrastructure independently and manage it as it grows. It is more cost effective to have centralized infrastructure. In essence, we provide HPC capabilities in terms of research software, the storage in petabyte range, and other services related to helping them get research done which is everything from looking at modeling and simulations and trying to find the cure for cancer.
 

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