“Cloud adoption is accelerating research capabilities and mission needs at the National Institutes of Health, the institutes’ Center for Information Technology CIO Andrea Norris said at the SXSW conference this week.”
“NIH supports over 300,000 researchers and about 2,500 academic institutions, including medical centers around the U.S. and world. Each individual and organization NIH supports is generating exponentially more data than in the past, giving NIH the challenge of storing and managing all of that data to fuel effective research.”
“Norris said with the volume of data generation doubling year over year at NIH, technology like the cloud is enabling NIH’s IT capabilities to keep up with the research that the institute is producing — everything from basic science to clinical trials and the creation of new treatments and cures.”
“Data-heavy programs and projects across NIH have especially benefited from cloud adoption, including the All of Us Program to collect the health data of a million volunteers, the BRAIN Initiative to map the human brain, as well as the data set work with cancer genomic data.”
“’These data resources are so big, you couldn’t really compute on them. You couldn’t download them and compute on them in local environments at our research centers and universities around the country and on our campus,’ Norris said. ‘Cloud became a necessity. It has really helped change the way we do science.’”
“In the past 18 to 24 months, NIH has moved over 100 petabytes of scientific data, 350 national research programs and 15 million computer hours to the cloud. Norris added that NIH has also trained over 3,000 individuals through the cloud, highlighting how critical the cloud has especially been in just a short period of time.”
“Norris touched on the role of the STRIDES Initiative — an effort to partner with commercial cloud platform providers to streamline NIH data — in recent adoption of the institute’s cloud environments and in improving research capabilities…” Read the full article here.
Source: NIH CIT CIO: Cloud Changed The Way We Do Science – By Melissa Harris, Mach 16, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
