An integrated approach to improve clinical trial efficiency: Linking a clinical trial management system into the Research Integrated Network of Systems.

Low-accruing clinical trials delay translation of research breakthroughs into the clinic, expose participants to risk without providing meaningful clinical insight, increase the cost of therapies, and waste limited resources. By tracking patient accrual, Clinical and Translational Science Awards hubs can identify at-risk studies and provide them the support needed to reach recruitment goals and maintain financial solvency. However, tracking accrual has proved challenging because relevant patient- and protocol-level data often reside in siloed systems.

Dissemination and continuous improvement of a CTSA-based software platform, SPARCRequest, using an open source governance model.

SPARCRequest© (Services, Pricing, & Application for Research Centers) is a web-based research management system that provides a modular and adaptable "electronic storefront" for research-related services. Developed by the South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research Institute at the Medical University of South Carolina, it was released as open source (OS) code in 2014. The adoption of SPARCRequest© accelerated in 2016, when, to ensure responsiveness to the needs of partners, its governance also became open.

Managing a Heterogeneous Cluster.

Most HPC clusters are purchased with a large quantity of identical hardware, which is maintained through its lifecycle and then another HPC cluster takes its place. However, some clusters, like ours, are maintained by frequently adding new hardware, which is then integrated into the system. Over the years, the cluster has grown to include 300+ compute nodes with 8000+ cores from 6 vendors, spanning 5 generations of CPUs; 7 network technologies from 6 switch vendors (1Gbps-100Gbps, including Ethernet, Infiniband, and OmniPath); 102 GPUs (3 different GPU models); 28 storage nodes (3+ PB raw storage); and 7 virtualization nodes hosting 65 VMs.