“Any way you look at it, the data and compute demands of the National Institutes of Health are dauntingly large. NIH is composed of 27 institutes or centers. These encompass some 110 laboratories. The agency’s distributed research network moves six petabytes of data daily. NIH also funds research at some 2,500 universities and medical centers, spending more than $40 billion each year.”
“From an information technology standpoint, NIH is all about big data and big scientific computing. Given the size and scope of data and applications, coupled with the worldwide collaborative nature of NIH activities, it’s no wonder commercial cloud computing has become a large and essential part of the agency’s IT approach.”
“Much of the cloud planning and contracting falls to NIH’s Center for Information Technology. Its chief information officer, Andrea Norris, sorted it all out when she spoke at Federal News Network’s Cloud Exchange.”
“A lot of what we support are in big data, scientific data repositories,” Norris said. “That’s a big chunk of where our technology and data resources are.”
“Moreover, that data, ultimately paid for with tax dollars, belongs to the public.”
“’A lot of our data is public access, public domain. We make it accessible to the general public, and especially, of course, to researchers around the world,’ Norris said. ‘We are a big supporter of public access data. And for science, we believe open access is the way to accelerate discovery. And so we have very large programmatic and discipline-specific data repositories with computational tools and job aids, where researchers come to conduct their science…'” Read the full article here.
Source: Cloud Exchange: NIH and NHLBI are innovating through cloud services – By Tom Temin, September 17, 2021. Federal News Network.
