The Genome Analysis Center (TGAC), one of seven institutes that receives funding from the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), has deployed two Convey HC-1ex hybrid-core systems for advanced genomics research.
TGAC, based in the UK, is an aggressive adopter of advanced sequencing and IT technology. The two Convey HC-1ex systems are the latest addition to TGAC’s powerful computing infrastructure.
By installing hybrid-core Convey HC-1ex systems, TGAC expanded its cluster and ccNUMA-based HPC environment to include leading-edge heterogeneous computing capabilities.
'We need to analyse data quickly and precisely, which takes time on clusters,' explained Mario Caccamo, deputy director of TGAC.
'We offloaded some of our sequence alignment demand to the Convey hybrid-core systems, because they can handle the alignment algorithms much more efficiently. Using the Convey systems, we are seeing up to 15 times acceleration on our computationally intense BWA runs.'
TGAC was part of an international team that recently demonstrated next-generation sequencing could be used effectively to fine map genes in polyploidy wheat. TGAC will leverage Convey’s architecture to accelerate computationally challenging jobs, such as resequencing alignment for wheat and other polyploidy species.
'The initial performance jump is a major improvement,' continued Caccamo. 'We expect to achieve even better performance as we gain experience using the Convey platform.'