Garber awarded high-performance computing seed grant

Bioinformatist will focus on cloud and big data platforms for scientific and high-performance computing

Manuel Garber, PhD, associate professor of molecular medicine and bioinformatics & integrative biology, and director of the Bioinformatics Core at UMass Medical School, is a member of a multi-university team that has been awarded one of six $100,000 seed grants from the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). Dr. Garber will collaborate with Prashant Shenoy, PhD, professor of computer science at UMass Amherst, in an initiative with Boston University and Northeastern University titled “Designing Cloud and Big Data Platforms for Scientific and HPC [high-performance computing] Applications.”

The MGHPCC is a $90 million, 90,000-square-foot, state-of-the art data center dedicated to supporting the growing research computing needs of five of the most research-intensive universities in Massachusetts: Boston University, Harvard University, MIT, Northeastern University and UMass. Opened in 2012 by its member academic institutions with support from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and private industry, the MGHPCC is funding the seed grants to promote scientific research collaboration through high-performance computing.

Garber joined UMMS in 2012. He received his PhD in mathematics from Brandeis University and was previously a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Focused on analyzing the human genome sequence, Garber developed comparative sequence analysis methods which have been critical to the discovery and characterization of a novel set of large intergenic non-coding RNAs and to the understanding of the immune transcriptional response to pathogens.

“This year’s projects reflect a continued commitment of the five MGHPCC universities to collaborate in creative ways on cutting-edge scientific problems of importance to the commonwealth—in strategic areas such as the life sciences, climate change and big data,” said Thomas Chmura, president of the MGHPCC and vice president for economic development for UMass.