Purdue University

Purdue University was recently awarded 1.2 Petabytes of hard disk drive (HDD) storage from Western Digital to further enable research that relies on quick access to big data repositories. This award, granted through Western Digital’s Petabyte Innovation Quest (PIQ “PEAK” Award), helps bolster Purdue’s robust ecosystem of data services and data-driven models by creating the Purdue One Health Data Engine (POHDE)—a storage facility aimed at facilitating research spanning disciplines from weather and climate, to ecosystem health, to environmental toxicology, to plant and animal health, to personalized human health.

Last year, the Western Digital PEAK Award sought solicitations for innovative ideas that could help explore the unlimited power of data storage for the betterment of society. The Institute for a Sustainable Future (ISF), together with the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering (RCHE)—two highly successful transdisciplinary Purdue institutes—proposed a joint initiative on “One Health” to create POHDE. The POHDE project aims to quantitatively understand the relationship between a person’s environment and their health.

“Jointly studying the health of the environment, including: climate, managed and unmanaged ecosystems, air-water-soil quality, together with a highly personalized accounting of this environment with people, requires the fusion of data types and scales that is deeply challenging,” says Matthew Huber, a professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science and former director of ISF. “The PEAK Award helps us meet this challenge.”

In pursuance of Purdue’s One Health initiative, POHDE fuses massive, multifaceted, and unique data that will enable campus researchers to generate breakthroughs for improving the health and well-being of people and the biosystems upon which humanity depends. Initial applications include high-resolution weather/climate data relevant for extreme events—heat waves, extreme rain, or air quality events, etc.—and health impacts (datasets are typically 300-500 TB in size). This data will be co-located with environmental/biodiversity (~300 TB) and health datasets (~300TB) at various scales, highlighting the need for a large, centrally-managed and easily accessible storage solution. Cloud storage presents a host of issues for such applications (high latency, security issues, etc.), so the Ultrastar® Data60 Hybrid Storage Platform with 60 20TB HDDsawarded by Western Digital is crucial to the POHDE project’s success.

The POHDE storage facility has been seamlessly integrated into Purdue’s research computing ecosystem, which is maintained and operated by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC), and researchers are already putting it to use.

“We’re excited that Western Digital’s HDD system has been added to accelerate our portfolio of storage options,” says Preston Smith, executive director of RCAC and director of computing infrastructure for Purdue’s Institute for Physical Artificial Intelligence. “With a petabyte of fast HDD-based storage available to Purdue’s One Health mission, POHDE will enable the university to be at the forefront of innovation in research where environmental health and personal health intersect.”

Matthew Huber is the lead for the POHDE project. Co-leads include Pavlos Vlachos (RCHE Director), Betsy Hillery (RCHE Data Specialist), and Carol Song (RCAC Chief Research Scientist). To learn more about the variety of research that POHDE will enable, please visit Purdue’s One Health website. More information about the ISF and their research pursuits can be found here, while information about RCHE efforts can be found here.

RCAC operates all centrally-maintained research computing resources at Purdue University, providing access to leading-edge computational and data storage systems as well as expertise and support to Purdue faculty, staff, and student researchers. To learn more about HPC and how RCAC can help you, please visit: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu