Accelerating and simplifying genomics analytics

[AdvEXperts]

Reach insights faster, simplify infrastructure provisioning and management, and deploy with confidence using the HPE and Intel Genomics Analytics solution.

Key takeaways

• Challenges like huge datasets, complex hardware/software stacks, and cost are barriers to advancing genomics analytics.
• The pre-tuned, optimized, validated, and verified HPE Intel Genomics Analytics solution can help surmount these hurdles.
• Customers can benefit from cross-ecosystem collaboration, end-to-end services, and deep expertise from engineers to help size and configure genomics analytics infrastructure.

Similar to how research into antibiotics radically changed the medical profession and patients' lives in the mid 20^th century, genomics analytics is poised to transform drug discovery and development, and precision medicine.

Genomics analytics has been at the heart of the COVID-19 research, from developing mRNA vaccines to pinpointing why some people exhibit severe symptoms while others are asymptomatic. Genomics is also used to determine how a person’s genetic makeup affects drug resistance, cancer spread, and cardiovascular problems and treatment. Additional areas where genomics can advance our quality of life include diagnostic testing for cancer in clinical settings for faster diagnosis and treatment, and understanding the genetic makeup of plants and animals to help unlock the secrets to better and more resilient food.

The cost of sequencing the human genome has fallen from $10 million in 2007 to under $1000 today, leading to a global wellspring of genomics analytics projects from Canada to Australia, to Chile and South Korea. But challenges still remain:

• Data management: Genomics datasets are huge—a typical genomics analytics input dataset is about 150 GB (assuming 30X coverage), and higher coverage samples can be hundreds of GBs in size.
• Speed: It takes time and effort to design a genomics analytics cluster, then optimize its performance. Every delay can have negative implications for fast diagnosis and treatment selection.
• Scalability: Processing this amount of data, with the scalability required in a fast-changing field, is a substantial compute problem. Considerations include determining the best hardware and software components to deploy and integrating all the components, so they work well together. Data sharing is another aspect of scalability -- there is a need for world-wide collaboration to solve the most difficult problems, so analytic scale is critical.
• Cost: Return on investment for a genomics analytics platform is a key consideration. Customers are concerned about cost/performance and paying only for the resources they need—but they need to be able to expand when necessary.

Now that millions of genomes have been sequenced, there is a massive amount of data that can be subjected to secondary analysis. The HPE and Intel Genomics Analytics solution helps solve the challenges just discussed, enabling leaps in health and life sciences knowledge.

The HPE and Intel Genomics Analytics solution is a pre-packaged, pre-tuned solution that provides the hardware, software, and services needed to perform germline variant calling and other genomics analytics workloads. Intel and HPE have taken the guesswork out of sizing and configuring a genomics analytics cluster. The solution is guaranteed to meet or exceed specific performance metrics and is easy to deploy and scale. This validated reference design is an end-to-end hardware and software package developed in collaboration with the Intel and Broad Institute.

Figure 1: The HPE and Intel Genomics Analytics solution is a pre-packaged, pre-tuned solution that accelerates and simplifies genomics analytics.

With an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-manage genomics analytics solution, researchers can focus on finding insights, not on provisioning and managing IT infrastructure. What’s more, the same solution stack can run other data-intensive workloads, like AI and machine learning, so that customers can get more out of their investment.

Ready for more? See how HPE and Intel can help you tap into your data's potential with HPC. 

Advantage EX Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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