MRI: Acquisition of a High Performance Computer Cluster for The New York Botanical Garden

New York Botanical Garden, Bronx NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award funds the acquisition of a high performance computer cluster at The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). The cluster will be used to study a wide variety of topics in plant biology including evolution, gene function, three-dimensional image reconstruction, ecosystem function, and DNA based specimen identification. The analyses conducted with the computer cluster will be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. A computer cluster at NYBG will broadly impact the research of a wide variety of constituencies: (1) An internship program formed between NYBG and the Bronx High School of Science, a school of highly gifted students from predominantly minority background, will give at students the opportunity to perform independent research in a laboratory. (2) The quality of the graduate program will improve as students will have a more powerful data analysis option and will be more broadly trained in current techniques. (3) Undergraduate and graduate students will be offered a class on Computational Methods in Biology at Lehman College (CUNY), a predominantly minority institution.