Over at Scalability.org, Joe Landman writes that we are on the cusp of a healthcare revolution that will be sparked by high performance parallelized genomics analysis.
This article came out talking about a massive performance analytics pipeline at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio. This pipeline runs on a cluster attached to Scalable Informatics FastPath Unison storage. This is a very dense, very fast system, interconnected with Mellanox FDR Infiniband, Chelsio 40GbE, and leveraging BeeGFS from thinkparq.com. Much of the awesomeness is in the algorithm, a massively parallel system that is described in depth here: “Churchill: an ultra-fast, deterministic, highly scalable and balanced parallelization strategy for the discovery of human genetic variation in clinical and population-scale genomics.”
In this video from SC14, Landman describes some of Scalable Informatics technology that paved the way for this achievement.
I find it very awesome that they can perform their operations in a time scale of 90 minutes or so. This means that it could be practical for a clinical lab to include this. I could wax philosophical about this, but this is no small achievement. High performance parallelized genomics analysis brought to the clinic in nearly real time. What could researchers do with this? We are happy to be a small part of this, contribute to this. Performance is an enabler. It lets you do not simply cool things. It lets you do things that may have a positive impact upon society at large.
