Penguin Solutions helps a private medical school advance biomedical research with AI and HPC infrastructure expertise

A private medical school in the Northeast United States is at the forefront of groundbreaking life sciences and biomedical research. The college is home to over 2,000 faculty members and more than 1,000 researchers and students tackling critical challenges in areas such as epigenetics, disease identification, image processing, and more—driving advancements in medical treatment.

This vital work relies not only on the ingenuity of the school’s staff and faculty, but also on an AI and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure that provides the computational power and ease of use necessary to advance these research objectives.

The challenge

AI and HPC play a crucial role in bioinformatics, life sciences, and medical research, enabling researchers to address complex problems using massive datasets. This work requires substantial computational power, specialized infrastructure, and deep expertise.

The college’s leaders recognized that they needed a partner to deliver an advanced computing infrastructure capable of supporting the extensive research activities of its students and faculty. The solution had to be scalable to meet evolving capacity needs and user-friendly for medical students and researchers to use without requiring a computer science background.

Prior to working with Penguin Solutions, the college’s IT infrastructure grew without a unified design as new components were added individually to meet the specific needs of different projects. This approach resulted in data being siloed within departments (hindering collaboration and data sharing) as well as unmanageable increasing costs. Additionally, the college’s IT staff spent significant time addressing the diverse demands of over 300 active research labs, further slowing progress.

The opportunity

As data grew exponentially and the demands of their diverse research community expanded, the need to modernize the infrastructure became urgent. IT leaders realized that managing these demands on their own would not deliver the results they needed.

To provide their researchers with a competitive edge and remain at the forefront of biomedical innovation, the college had to upgrade its AI and HPC infrastructure, leveraging Penguin Solutions’ industry-leading expertise.

With some of the world’s most accomplished researchers, this change offered significant potential: the right infrastructure and support would allow the faculty to focus on delivering continuous breakthroughs in medical science.

Additionally, much of the college’s funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, which, like the global scientific community, emphasizes the importance of data sharing. By modernizing its AI and HPC infrastructure, the school could share findings more efficiently, helping accelerate critical medical innovations worldwide.

The solution

Advancing medical research and breakthroughs with industry-leading infrastructure and managed services Penguin Solutions designs, builds, deploys, and manages AI, HPC, and accelerated computing infrastructures at scale.

Building and maintaining high-performance computing clusters comes with a variety of challenges, and for a college dedicated to medical research, this undertaking presents significant technological hurdles, resource skill gaps, and financial risks. Penguin Solutions’ team of experts delivered a tailored infrastructure solution to meet the college’s unique needs, including the Penguin Solutions ICE ClusterWare™ platform, backed by our industry-leading managed services.

ICE ClusterWare is an intelligent and intuitive cluster management solution that transforms hardware, storage, networking, and software resources into comprehensive AI and HPC clusters. By simplifying and automating cluster deployment and administration, ICE ClusterWare ensures optimal performance and efficiency of AI and HPC infrastructure. ICE ClusterWare offers key features like node provisioning and health and performance monitoring with a user-friendly interface.

The Penguin Solutions Managed Services team stays fully immersed in the latest advancements in the field. Working closely with the college, our experts designed and implemented solutions tailored to its unique needs, empowering researchers to focus on discovery.

Acting as an extension of the school’s IT team, Penguin Solutions supports the current infrastructure design and implementation, as well as offers proactive guidance to optimize infrastructure investments. This approach ensures the school’s infrastructure remains cutting-edge and aligned with their research goals now and in the future.

Results

By teaming up with Penguin Solutions, the college has emerged as a model for research institutions across the country. Their fully integrated Penguin compute infrastructure removed the need for costly, complex, and piecemeal infrastructure, while Penguin Solutions Managed Services ensure streamlined operations.

As a result, staff and faculty can focus entirely on research rather than IT management.

Penguin Solutions has also significantly improved the school’s efficiency, with a notable impact on financial savings. By eliminating unnecessary infrastructure expansion and ensuring all computing resources are fully utilized, Penguin Solutions has helped the school achieve a significantly lower total cost of ownership and a higher return on investment.

The school’s computing capabilities are now fully dedicated to driving advancements

that will positively impact everyone, leveraging every available processing power to fuel groundbreaking discoveries.