The complete genetic blueprint of the human body, encompassing both its functional and physical aspects, has been made possible through advancements in big data, storage, and computing technologies. This has ushered in a new era of digital genomics.
According to the BIS Research report, the functional genomics market had a valuation of $10.57 billion in 2022, and it is projected to expand to $46.24 billion by 2033. This growth is expected to occur at a CAGR of 14.04% between the forecast period of 2023 and 2033.
Huawei, along with three other entities, has collaborated to develop an accelerated analysis platform for multi-omics data.
This platform incorporates novel architectures, computing techniques, and storage solutions. As a result, the time required for analyzing a 30X human whole genome sequencing (WGS) germline mutation has been significantly reduced to a mere 7 minutes, a remarkable improvement from the previous duration of 24 hours.
Here’s the Complete Story
The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) is a yearly event that serves as a platform for highlighting the latest advancements in the field of supercomputing. It gathers experts from various specialized areas, including life sciences and genetics research, with the aim of uncovering the origins and enigmas of our existence.
Huawei's OceanStor Pacific, along with high-performance computing (HPC), is at the forefront of the developments in supercomputing technologies and is playing a pivotal role in accelerating genome sequencing research.
This achievement has far-reaching implications in the fields of precision medicine, healthcare, and big data analysis, representing a noteworthy milestone in medical research.
Given the demanding nature of genome sequencing and its impact on data infrastructure, the use of high-performance computing (HPC) solutions becomes imperative to ensure adequate computing power and efficient storage for managing large datasets. In response to this challenge, West China Hospital (WCH) has leveraged the strengths of Sailegene and Huawei, harnessing their competitive advantages to tackle these issues effectively.
Key Features of Huawei’s OceanStor Pacific Scale-Out Storage
As supercomputing technologies advance rapidly, there is an increase in the discovery of genome sequences, which brings about new challenges. The analysis of these sequences requires extensive data processing and parallel computing for tasks such as homology search, alignment, and mutation detection. Consequently, there are stringent demands placed on the data infrastructure of genomics data analysis platforms.
Following are the highlighted features and technologies of Huawei’s OceanStor Pacific:
Enhanced Speed: Private clients boast a single-thread bandwidth of 6 GB/s, enabling fast performance. The Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) algorithm ensures rapid read processing and linear growth of aggregated bandwidth.
Adaptability to Diverse Workloads: The system supports various high-performance computing (HPC) input/output (I/O) models, accommodating a hybrid workload.
Scalability and Expandability: The platform offers flexible expansion capabilities to meet the requirements of genome research at an exabyte (EB) scale.
Huawei's OceanStor Pacific enables the efficient loading and processing of large volumes of data in memory during sequence alignment. When compared to the hospital's previous storage solution, OceanStor Pacific demonstrates twice the single-thread read bandwidth and four times the single-thread write bandwidth.
With a mere four nodes, it achieves an impressive aggregate bandwidth of 30 GB/s for reading and 25 GB/s for writing, thereby greatly enhancing the performance of the multi-omics joint innovation platform.
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