CC*IIE Networking Infrastructure: Data Driven Expansion at The University of South Alabama

University Of South Alabama, Mobile AL

Investigators

Abstract

The project's purpose is to expand the University of South Alabama Cyberinfrastructure to improve collaborative research capability between scientists in the Mitchell Cancer Institute and the School of Computing. Infrastructure improvements are necessary to handle the high volume data transfer required for large databases and imagery data that form the core of this research. Research enabled by these campus network improvements includes investigations into the degree to which descriptive data driven analysis methods can discover relationships among groups of cancer mutations across user-defined tumor groupings. Because the traditional hallmarks of cancer commonly arise in diverse forms of cancer, mutational interplay between seemingly unrelated genes must exist and must play a role in fine tuning tumor behavior to its environment. By employing a data driven approach, where each tumor genome is viewed as an independent evolution experiment, it is possible to evaluate the unique mutational signatures composed predominately of passenger mutations, in addition to the traditional focus on driver mutations. This project increases underlying data networking capacity by a factor of 10, and results in benefits to research and education across the University of South Alabama by transforming the campus core network to a high performance 10Gbps network.