Clinical Elastic High Performance Computing

SPRING 2012 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEES

Jonathan Appavoo (Dept. of Computer Science), Dr. Ellen Grant (Children’s Hospital and Harvard University)

One of the challenges in analyzing radiology data by computer is that it typically takes days to get the results, because the processing is computationally intensive. In a clinical setting, doctors and patients would benefit from getting results in seconds. To make this happen, doctors need to call upon massive computational power instantaneously, and they only use it for a short period of time. This kind of bursty use is common in cloud computing, but conventional cloud computing systems don’t have the high-speed interconnection between computers needed to process this kind of data. And conventional high-performance computing systems don’t have the interactive ability that doctors need. In this project, Dr. Grant and Prof. Appavoo will investigate putting those pieces together to create systems for on-demand radiological analysis. This research provides Prof. Appavoo a set of real applications to explore his model and mechanisms for  ’Interactive High-Performance Computing’, and gives Dr. Grant the systems expertise and computational resources to evaluate how well an interactive approach can benefit doctors and patients.

This work is funded by a Hariri Research Award made in June, 2012.