Beagle, the Cray XE6 supercomputer that has served University of Chicago biology and medical researchers for the last three years, is about to get an overhaul thanks to a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Already an integral high-performance computing resource for UChicago’s biomedical research community, the upgrade will set the stage for the next wave of pioneering discoveries, according to the institution.

When the metaphorical (let’s hope) dust settles, Beagle 2 will be 250-teraflops strong, providing a unique platform for the center’s forays into genomics, cell biology, drug design and personalized medicine. The upgrade will cluster’s size from 18,000 to 24,000 computing cores, raising its peak computational output by 60 percent. Improvements will also be made to RAM, disk storage, and networking to provide greater throughput in support of advanced molecular simulations, whole genome analysis and large-scale medical image analysis.

The original Beagle is noteworthy for its deployment in the newer computational fields of biology and medicine. While many leadership-class supercomputers are intended to be shared by multiple domains – physics, astronomy, and climate research and the like – Beagle is unique in that its primary role is to serve biomedical scientists with sophisticated analysis and modeling capabilities.

“By providing biologists access to powerful, world-class computing, Beagle and its expert crew provide the foundation for a new community of computational biomedicine at the University of Chicago, resulting in innovative research and influential publications,” reports Conrad Gilliam, Dean of Basic Science in the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. “Beagle-2 will further establish UChicago as a leader in applying computational techniques to the most important questions in biology and medicine today.”

Named after the ship that carried Charles Darwin on some of his most fruitful expeditions, Beagle is likewise an essential resource for propelling biological science and medicine. As the price point for genetic sequencing continues to fall, there is more pressure on analysis to make sense of that data and put it into practical use. University of Chicago officials expect the upgrade to accelerate NGS workflows at the institution. Already Beagle 1 has lent itself to 90 projects with some 300 users using the cluster for jobs that would be too data- or compute-intensive for smaller systems. The next step for researchers is optimizing their codes to take full advantage of the additional cores as they pursue breakthroughs in genomics, oncology, radiology and neurobiology.