SDSC Launches ‘Sherlock’ To Solve Complex National Challenges

Article Content

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, along with small business partners SD Technology and Chickasaw Nation Industries, have brought together their extensive portfolio of information technology services for healthcare and government under the ‘Sherlock’ brand in an effort to serve federal, state, and local governments as well as universities nationwide.

“We wanted to find a way to more clearly communicate our capabilities to potential partners, because we realize that the data management, technology, and policy challenges, especially in the health sector, can be overwhelmingly complex and confusing,” Dallas Thornton, Sherlock’s Director and SDSC’s Division Director for Health IT, said during the 29th Annual Conference of the National Association for Medicaid Program Integrity (NAMPI), held this week in Baltimore, MD.

Articulating the overall problem-solving goal of the character as well as the initiative, the ‘Sherlock’ brand is accompanied by the tagline ‘Solved.’ “Although he’s a fictional character created by Scottish author/physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle more than 100 years ago, Sherlock Holmes is still well-known worldwide, and among multiple generations, for his unerring ability to solve the most complex cases,” added Thornton. “That’s why we think this name is so appropriate for our initiative. In fact, one quote attributed to Sherlock Holmes could not be more applicable to today’s research-intensive world: ‘Data! Data! Data! I cannot make bricks without clay!’”

The ‘Sherlock’ team’s portfolio of expertise spans many IT disciplines, including cloud computing, cyber security, data management and mining, application development, high-performance computing (HPC), big data, and visualization. These experts have developed and deployed specific services designed to provide a solid and secure foundation for a wide range of initiatives, including how Sherlock is taking on healthcare fraud.

Today, ‘Sherlock’ offers four major products: Sherlock Analytics, Sherlock Case Management, Sherlock Cloud, and Sherlock Data Lab. These products comply with HIPAA and FISMA regulations for dealing with sensitive data and are each described in detail at www.Sherlock.com.

‘Sherlock’s’ resources are physically located within the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s (SDSC) Data Center, and, where needed for redundancy, in a secure data center in Northern California. SDSC’s Data Center is staffed around the clock and protected with controlled access systems, backup power, advanced fire suppression systems, and other safety measures. Sherlock Cloud systems interconnect with a 10Gb/s (gigabits per second) network fabric within the SDSC Data Center, and wide-area networking utilizes more than 100Gb/s of high-bandwidth connections to the Internet and research networks such as Internet2, National Lambda Rail (NLR), and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC).