The Queensland Centre for Medical Genomics (QCMG) at the University of Queensland has selected SGI LiveArc storage solution to increase its ability to store, manage and process human cancer genome sequence data. This project will contribute to mapping the genetic changes that lead to cancer, providing better understanding of such cancers and potentially helping to combat the disease.

QCMG selected LiveArc to overcome the problems of tracking huge amounts of data and linking it to clinical information.

Since deploying the LiveArc solution in January 2010, QCMG has released two cancer genome sequences. QCMG’s goal is to sequence 30 patients over the next 12 months, which will include the genome, transcriptome and epigenome, ultimately providing insight into the genetic changes that have occurred and that can lead to pancreatic and ovarian cancer.

The centre is part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC), a worldwide effort to sequence 50 different types of human tumors from 25,000 individuals.

“QCMG chose SGI LiveArc because it was the most suitable system for deploying the Applied Biosystems Bioscope bioinformatics package, a critical component of the ICGC informatics pipeline,” said John Pearson, senior bioinformatics manager at QCMG. “The level of local service support offered by SGI was also a significant factor in choosing its technology.”

LiveArc is used for the management of metadata and workflow processes. This includes ingestion of assets from 11 genome sequencers – generating more than 1TB of unmapped data per week, replication of assets from the local data store to the university’s highly available long-term data store, delivery of primary data for processing using SGI high performance computing (HPC) and storage systems, and management of the resulting secondary and tertiary data sets.

The hardware infrastructure consists of 75TB of high-speed scratch storage and SGI Data Migration Facility (DMF) for hierarchical storage management. The I/O bandwidth performance of the scratch storage has been engineered for 3GB/sec and a high concurrent level of input-output operations rates (IOPS) to support the level of I/O processing required by the analysis and data processing applications.

“QCMG is the largest genome sequencing facility in the Southern Hemisphere, and SGI has been able to provide significant productivity advantages for this critical research through our unique technical expertise and products,” said Philip Chua, managing director and vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan at SGI.

“The QCMG joins an established list of research organizations using SGI LiveArc to greatly improve the organization's workflow and tracking of research data.”