The partnership between DOE and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), began in 2016 with the goal of applying high-performance computing (HPC) resources, deep learning models, and computational simulations to advance cancer research. The partnership established a consortium of four DOE national laboratories – Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – under the name Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACS4C).
JDACS4C, which aligns with objectives of the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative and the Cancer Moonshot Initiative, is working to advance HPC to support the NCI’s cancer treatment and research efforts, including targeting of drug therapy, dynamic simulation for drug discovery and development, and optimization of cancer therapies through secure, big data analysis of patient databases. The HPC capabilities of ORNL and NCCS – including data storage and the CITADEL security framework – allow research projects using sensitive patient data unprecedented use of the supercomputers, leading to critical scientific breakthroughs.
