As a DNA sequencing company, the client is dedicated to simplifying genetic testing while making it affordable. The organization is focused around developing a revolutionary, cost-effective DNA/RNA reader that can improve current understanding and diagnosis of cancer and infectious diseases, and other genetic diseases.
Need for a highly scalable and efficient solution to run more experiments every day
DNA sequencing of a single human genome can potentially produce several terabytes of data, which includes hundreds of millions of DNA fragments. With rapidly increasing data, client aimed at faster, less expensive DNA sequencing.
Analyzing Data: Once the genome has been sequenced, it must be analyzed. Researchers at client’s organization analyze raw data using proprietary software. Analysis of data requires intensive computational efforts and takes considerable amount of time. Once the data is analyzed, researchers launch it in visualization tools to see its annotated information.
Security: Researchers wanted a solution that could provide them the ability to collaborate with peers and re-submit or re-analyze the experiments in a secure and compliant environment. They also wanted a secure web-based solution that can provide them real-time status of experiments during their computational workflow.
Scalability and costs: The solution required an easily scalable, accessible, customizable, smart, and powerful computational and storage infrastructure. Computational and storage infrastructure was costing them several thousand dollars per month, running the analysis pipeline, and storing output on cloud helped them achieve desired scalability along with the significant cost reduction. Several hundreds of compute nodes can be added or removed during execution of analysis pipeline, hence optimizing solution cost.
Agility is in the DNA of the solution
This DNA sequencing company had carefully thought through several available solution providers who could meet their sequencing requirements. They chose to leverage the expertise of Persistent on leading cloud infrastructure providers like AWS and Google Cloud Platform. The digital consulting company engineers inspiring solutions with modern digital technologies to enable innovators to make their work productive, engaging, and meaningful for all.
Persistent delivered a cloud based genetic data analysis and discovery platform on AWS. The solution has a dynamic and intuitive interface that organizes analytical data related to experiments in an easily accessible, organized manner with smart filters to monitor progress of experiment through various stages of analysis.
Workflow Analysis: The application provides real time experiment status to the researchers for analyzing genetic data in real time. Data is categorized into easy to analyze categories to help research scholars keep track of their current and previous experiments, data results. Solution helps them reserve available instruments and laboratory systems, store data for future experiments, and receive daily, weekly, and monthly stats about various experiments.
Plus, researchers can select an already completed/failed/partially completed runs to re-analyze without logging into the cloud machine.
Solution goals
- Reduce time taken per experiment
- Reduce compute and storage cost per experiment
- Provide better visibility about the experiments
- Enable researchers / scientists to effectively run their experiments and improve research.
Highly Scalable: The solution delivers tens of thousands of compute scores, stores multiple terabytes of data, and facilitates peer collaboration globally in a secure and compliant environment. The new cloud workflow helped client to execute hundreds of experiments with-in few hours and are producing approximately 30+ terabyte (TB) data on daily basis. Number of daily experiments is no more a constraint as several experiments can run through analysis workflow concurrently.
Cost Effective: Solution helped client to execute DNA sequencing workflow on AWS infrastructure efficiently. This not only increased the throughput, reduced the overall time taken in performing analysis but also substantially reduced the analysis cost per experiment by around 60%.
The solution also provided 360-degree visibility to scientists throughout an experiment and analysis lifecycle. The solution delivered by Persistent offers reliability, security, and compliance vital to running complex and sensitive research activities.
