UM Steps Up

A New Cancer Center Designation Plus a New Super Computer

September 2019

The University of Miami continues to make strides in academic and research excellence with two major announcements.

The first is a prestigious NCI designation from the National Cancer Institute for the university’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. The Sylvester Center, part of UM’s Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, will now be one of only two NCI-designated cancer centers in Florida, and one of just 71 in the country. The NCI designation recognizes Sylvester’s excellence in clinical care, research and community outreach, and should advance its support and status as an elite cancer center; UM president Julio Frenk called it a “milestone” for the people of South Florida.

The second announcement is that UM’s new supercomputer, Triton, has been installed. The $3.7 million system uses the same AI-optimized architecture as the most powerful supercomputers in the world, namely the U.S. Department of Energy’s Summit and Sierra supercomputers, designed to process data, well, super efficiently. UM students can access Triton from their laptops, logging in to process data independently. Applications include use in the fields of genomics, climate change, and theoretical physics.