IU’s Grand Challenges Program

IU’s Grand Challenges Program is a bold commitment to address the issues that impact Indiana and the world. The challenges are split into three categories: the Precision Health Initiative, Prepared for Environmental Change, and Responding to the Addiction Crisis. As these large-scale programs and projects ramp up in size and scope, Research Technologies at UITS remains committed to providing support to the IU Grand Challenges Program, and stands ready to assist with the high performance computing needs that might arise.

Addictions

Raymond Sheppard of RT has been working with the IU School of Nursing to re-create a Microsoft Windows computational environment in which they can conduct research on Karst without needing to know how to use a supercomputer. Researchers are using this environment on a variety of projects, including one studying the pharmacokinetics of buprenorphine in pregnant women undergoing treatment for opioid use disorder.

Monitoring the health of Hoosier moms

Patient surveys powered by IU’s REDCap help understand the genetic risks of gestational diabetes in Hoosier moms as part of the Precision Health Initiative. Updates to REDCap’s “date calculated” field allow for more accurate tracking of patients’ trimesters and improve data collection.

“Patients can answer questions in the comfort of their homes. The ability for research teams to quickly and easily create projects and surveys is invaluable.”

Kathleen Flannery
Study Coordinator, Obstetrics and Gynocology Research, IU School of Medicine

Environmental Resilience Institute

Indiana’s climate is warming, a development with wide-ranging consequences for our state’s economy and health. Funded through IU’s Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge initiative, the Environmental Resilience Institute is working to prepare businesses, families, and communities to adapt—and thrive—amid these changes. Research Technologies at UITS is providing research support through resources such as high performance computing.

Prepared for Environmental Change

Ranjan Muthukrishnan of the IU Environmental Resilience Institute recently published a paper in which he and his collaborators use HPC simulations to offer a new angle on commonly held understandings of the composition-colonization trade-off within ecosystems. Muthukrishnan’s simulations explore the influence of species plasticity in this context. Plasticity, when brought into the equation, allows for competitive hierarchies to shift, leading to more coexistence in a broader range of conditions.

“If one were to consider only one set of conditions, this type of simulation would not be overly complex. To play it out in lots of different circumstances, high performance computing resources, like those IU provides through Big Red 3 and Carbonate, are essential. Playing out simulations in a way that includes a whole landscape of possible locations requires a large amount of computer memory. IU’s supercomputers give the large-scale simulations ample time to run through different scenarios and show results even when they depend on important, rare events.”

Ranjan Muthukrishnan
Research Scientist, Environmental Resilience Institute, IU Bloomington