Anvil to support upcoming BigCARE 2024 Summer Workshop
The 2024 BigCARE Summer Workshop is soon to commence at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). This year will be UCI’s first time hosting the summer workshop, with the university opening its doors from July 14-26 for all cancer researchers to come and learn. The two-week intensive workshop aims to help cancer researchers develop skills for managing, visualizing, analyzing, and integrating various types of omics data in cancer studies, specifically for those who are inexperienced in big data science. Purdue University’s Anvil supercomputer will support the workshop by providing the attendees with access to a high-performance computing (HPC) resource designed to have a low barrier of entry for newcomers.
The BigCare workshop, otherwise known as the "Big Data Training for Cancer Research," is a program funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). It was founded in 2020 by Min Zhang, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, Irvine’s Program in Public Health, and the biostatistics shared resources director for the UCI Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Zhang recognized a need for specialized HPC and Big Data training for cancer researchers and designed BigCARE to provide for that need. This year’s workshop will focus on analyzing and interpreting genomic and genetic data, including transcriptomic analyses, epigenomic analyses, genome-wide association analyses, and network analyses. The workshop will also cover COVID and microbiome data analysis by introducing infectious and immune-mediated disease-related data sets, a first for BigCARE.
Anvil’s role in the BigCARE workshop is to provide HPC resources through Open OnDemand and Jupyter Notebooks, which limits the need for in-depth knowledge of command line interfaces or HPC server environments. Anvil's GUI-based interfaces help cancer researchers focus more of their talents and energy on collecting and processing their data without having to take a detour to learn more advanced computational skills. Aside from providing the hardware and software needed to run the workshop, Anvil adds value to BigCARE through the user support provided by the RCAC (Rosen Center for Advanced Computing) team. In fact, Eric Adams, a Senior Manager for User Support at RCAC, will even be on-site at UCI during the BigCARE workshop to help with any support tasks that arise.
“I am deeply honored to have been invited back to the BigCare workshop for 2024 and to be asked to travel to UCI in order to provide support,” says Adams. “Meeting dedicated researchers who are passionate about their work and assisting them in advancing cancer research is incredibly fulfilling. It reinforces the significance of what RCAC offers.”
More information about the BigCare 2024 Summer Workshop can be found on their “Big Data Training for Cancer Research” webpage. Information about the Anvil supercomputer can be found on Purdue’s Anvil Website.
For more information regarding HPC and how it can help you, please visit our “Why HPC?” page. Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632. Researchers may request access to Anvil via the ACCESS allocations process.
Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu