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Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource is enabled by the equipment groupings listed below. The equipment supports the research computing initiative of the Institute. The Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource also supports the Institutional file server.

• High-resolution digital camera with RGB liquid crystal filter (Olympus DP70 and DP71) to digitize array specimens

• Computer assisted microscopy system composed of Olympus AX70 and BX40 microscopes equipped with a Prior 6-way robotic stage and motorized turret

• Network-based Oracle database system

• Nuance multispectral imaging system which allows for accurate spectral classification and unmixing. It can be configured for either brightfield or fluorescence microscopy in the visible (VIS) wavelength range of 420-720 nm (up to 950 nm for fluorescence-only systems)

• Nikon Eclipse 90i fully automated bright-field/fluorescent microscopic imaging station with Photometric Coolsnap ES2 camera

• Olympus VS120 bright-field/fluorescent whole slide scanner with 100 slide capacity and standalone processing workstation

• Image server within Rutgers firewall to allow visualization, sharing and annotation to digitized specimens.

In addition, the Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource has application, database and storage server hardware with appropriate redundancy in place for clinical operations supporting both the Aria electronic medical record and the OnCore clinical trials software platform. The Resource is enabled by the Rutgers University High Performance Computing Group that has recently acquired an NIH shared equipment grant funding a compute cluster composed of CPU and GPU compute nodes. The machine is a Lenovo NextScale (formerly IBM NextScale) with 132 compute nodes (128Gbyte, dual Haswell 10-core sockets), 8 GPU nodes (same node spec but with twin K80 GPU's), 2PB (raw) IBM GPFS (now called Spectrum Scale) and FDR Infiniband arranged in a 1X fat tree. The GPFS will be connected to the network fabric over 6 IB ports.  In addition there is one large memory node (1.5TB memory and 48 cores).  The Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource uses this resource for computationally intensive projects such as molecular modeling, genetic epidemiology, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations in bioinformatics, machine learning, etc. The Resource’s Bioinformatics specialists work with two scientific application technicians and a software engineer associated with the Rutgers/IST HPC Group (and funded by the university) to help researchers develop, port or tune code onto the HPC platform.

Security: The Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource follows the best practice guidelines of the University for maintaining security. All enterprise server hardware is located behind secure firewalls on a private network. Remote access is provisioned to employees and vendors via VPN and all vendors are covered by a Business Associate Agreement as required by HIPAA. SSH/SCP/SFTP is used to secure internal communications. E-mail containing PHI data is encrypted automatically and/or manually by Zix. Other data in transit is secured via, encrypted large file transfer provided by the LiFT device by Accelion, point to point VPN, or via rsync through encrypted tunnel. Data at rest (onsite backup, offsite backup and archives) and all mobile device data are encrypted (AES 256 bit) according to policy. Strong passwords are enforced. SOP’s are maintained centrally, updated annually, and available for review.