ARCHIVED: Advanced Biomedical IT Core

The Advanced Biomedical IT Core (ABITC), one of many Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (Indiana CTSI) Service Cores at the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM), is a gateway designed to help IU biomedical researchers and those in related fields use the advanced, HIPAA-capable information technology systems and services provided by the Research Technologies division of University Information Technology Services (UITS) and the IU Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI).

As an IUSM research Core, the ABITC provides information technology solutions for problems confronting health care research labs, and partners in innovative approaches to medical research by offering consultation with the Core's programming staff, and enabling researchers in IUSM and allied health fields to make use of the full capability and breadth of IU's advanced cyberinfrastructure - particularly, cyberinfrastructure managed by UITS Research Technologies.

On this page:

• Services offered by the ABITC
• Research Technology resources available through ABITC
• Unique features of ABITC and RT services
• Advantages of using ABITC and RT services
• Contact ABITC

Services offered by the ABITC

• Data management through REDCap: ABITC manages the REDCap web-based clinical data management application that supports distributed research teams. This service is particularly suited for small clinical studies where ease of data collection is paramount.
• Software applications: ABITC provides custom development and maintenance of software applications and interfaces that support research programs and collaborations at the local and national levels, as well as implementation and management of enterprise clinical research systems. Current projects include the National Gene Vector Biorepository and the Collaborative Initiative for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders.
• Document sharing through Alfresco Share: ABITC provides Alfresco Share, a web-based collaboration platform that provides document sharing, wikis, discussion lists, blogs, and other social media tools for distributed research teams.
• Management, analysis, and dissemination of research data: ABITC creates information workflows that allow easy, standards-based data entry, management, analysis, and dissemination of research data through web environments. These environments can grow with projects as researchers bring in national or international collaborators.
• Indiana CTSI HUB: ABITC manages the Indiana CTSI HUB, a web portal for translational research for the statewide Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.
• Gateway to RT Services: ABITC staff can act as expert consultants for health care investigators, helping them to identify the right type and configuration of services across RT and UITS, as ABITC staff are versed both in cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure and in the needs of health care researchers.
• Registries (coming in April 2014): ABITC can create research registries for larger clinical research projects in the Remedy Informatics registry system recently established by the Indiana CTSI.

Research Technology resources available through ABITC

• Storage for critical research data: RT provides central storage for working data. Data can be made visible on computers distributed around the lab or campus. All data are backed up. Additionally, projects can each get up to 10 TB of free archival storage, with all data replicated between Bloomington and Indianapolis.
• High-Performance Computing (HPC): RT provides supercomputers for computational and data-intensive analyses (e.g., BLAST, image analysis, and gene or protein analyses), and large-memory supercomputers that support sequence assembly using data from next-generation sequencers.
• Visualization: RT equipment, software, and technical expertise allow the display of medical information in two, three, and four dimensions.
• Virtual servers: Virtual servers are housed in the IU Data Center, and maintained and backed up by UITS (with a 99.99% uptime guarantee), but departments and groups retain complete control over their servers.
• Access to national computational grid environments: RT is an active participant in the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the Open Science Grid (OSG), and other national cyberinfrastructure facilities, and provides a doorway to the use of these as either a resource provider or a consumer.
• Strategic partnering in grant solicitation: RT has an established record of making research more competitive and productive while bringing to bear the advantages of a major university technology program to provide a competitive edge.

Unique features of ABITC and RT services

The IU School of Medicine has a number of units that supply information technology services and support, such as Information Services and Technology Management (ISTM), the Bioinformatics Core within the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, the Biostatistics Core in the Division of Biostatistics, and individual departmental or research groups. Many of these groups have deep, world-class expertise in particular algorithms, software, and services. ABITC has the capacity to implement these and other advanced information technology services at scale in partnership with those groups.

ABITC and Research Technologies provide IUSM with HIPAA-capable storage in amounts without comparison at any other medical school in the US. RT can implement and deliver advanced computational services via the largest university-owned, university-funded supercomputer in the US. RT delivers visualization capabilities that match the most sophisticated capabilities at any medical school or sensitive government agency in the US.

ABITC can help connect you to RT resources that are equipped to handle:

• Terabytes, even petabytes (a thousand terabytes = a million gigabytes) of storage
• TeraFLOPS (trillions of floating-point operations per second) of computing cycles
• Databases that can accommodate terabytes of data
• High-end visualization hardware and software

ABITC can also leverage the UITS production services infrastructure (e.g., climate-controlled data center with 24/7 service/hardware monitoring, 24/7 hardware and software support, 24/7 problem escalation, off-site backups).

Advantages of using ABITC and RT services

ABITC provides IT support for biomedical research and is the gateway to professional IT staff within IU's Research Technologies (RT) division with many years of experience helping researchers with their supercomputing, massive data storage, and visualization needs. While some or all of these services may be available at a lab or departmental level, ABITC offers several distinct advantages:

• RT systems are hosted in professionally maintained, air-conditioned, physically secure data centers, with 24/7 operational support and problem escalation.
• RT solutions are robust and scalable, and are developed in a rigorous environment that will ensure continued functionality as your data grow, standards evolve, and usage models change.
• RT can store and archive massive data sets that cannot be managed reliably in a laboratory. As storage media ages and evolves, we are committed to ensuring seamless access to your data while continually evaluating and embracing new storage technologies (meaning that data will be migrated continuously, automatically, and without any action on your part while innovation occurs). Such high reliability ensures data protection now and into the future.
• RT supercomputing systems can handle computationally and data-intensive analyses, likely far beyond the reach of lab or departmental computers.
• Visualization labs at IUPUI permit novel data exploration and dissemination using techniques such as virtual reality, 3D imaging, and others that employ the highest-end hardware available today.
• RT is a national leader in grid computing and national supercomputing alliances, such as the Open Science Grid and XSEDE projects.

Contact ABITC

Email Advanced Biomedical IT Core