The Advanced IT Core (AITC) is descended from the INGEN (INdiana GENomics) initiative. INGEN was a large grant by the Lilly Endowment that funded the IUSM and other entities on campus to boost IU's genomics research. UITS' Research and Academic Computing division at the time constituted the INGEN Advanced IT Core. Early in the grant (2001), UITS made major investments (~$5 million) in its research computing infrastructure, including an upgrade of its IBM SP supercomputer to a processing capacity of one TeraFLOP (1,000 billion floating point operations per second) and a major expansion of the Massive Data Storage Service system. In addition, five new staff members were hired to support projects in high-performance computing, massive data storage, and visualization.

The INGEN IT Core has played a key role in several major NIH-funded projects, including the Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (CIFASD) Informatics Core, the CIFASD Facial Imaging Core, and the National Gene Vector Laboratories (NGVL) toxicology database. These projects have resulted in over $5 million in funding to IU with approximately $2 million of that funding going to UITS.

With the end of the INGEN grant in sight, IUSM and UITS joined forces in 2007 to transform the INGEN Advanced IT Core into a full fledged IUSM Advanced IT Core (AITC). In its new incarnation, the AITC is currently working to enable the storage and processing of electronic protected health information (ePHI) on Research Technologies systems for research purposes. This will expand the relevance and impact of IU's cyberinfrastructure to a larger portion of the IUSM research community.

INGEN Grant information:

• Project sponsor: Craig Stewart, Associate Dean for Research Technologies
• Funding agency: Lilly Endowment, Inc.
• Grant dates: December 2000-December 2008
• Funding to UITS: $6.7 million
• Total funding to IU: $105 million (phase 1) plus $50 million (phase 2)