Translational Research Institute (TRI) has chosen technical computing provider SGI to provide a big data HPC solution to accelerate results at its new research centre.
The facility, which represents four leading medical research institutes, will focus on advanced treatments and therapies for common and serious disease such as cancers, diabetes, inflammatory diseases, HIV, malaria, bone and joint diseases, and obesity. The Institute, in Brisbane, Australia, is destined to be the largest biomedical research institute in the southern hemisphere.
Researchers will now have access to the necessary technology and facilities in one location, which they say will improve productivity. SGI's compute and data storage provides more than 2,200 SGI rackable compute cores, 256 cores and four terabytes of memory, and more than one petabyte of high-performance storage. Up to three petabytes of historical and inactive data will be stored on tape.
TRI says the solution will complement the massive amounts of data that high resolution gene sequencers, microscopes and associated laboratory equipment generate, and will assist in increasing productivity and accelerating the time to discovery of new treatments, subsequent commercialisation and significant patents.
TRI chief operating officer Kate Johnston highlighted the rapid advances seen in research and development over the last decade, signalling that scientific research is fast becoming an exercise in handling enormous data sets.
'Scientists are essentially looking for the veritable "needle in a haystack" in among this data,' said Johnston. 'Without the correct technology to do this it could take researchers years to find their needle. The SGI high-performance cluster provides our researchers with the computing power they need in order to both analyse and appropriately store their large experimental datasets.'
