IBM eX5 Improves Next Generation Sequencing for Sanger Institute

Life sciences and High Performance Computing(HPC) have a symbiotic relationship -- life sciences
research today relies heavily on HPC infrastructure even as HPC itself evolves rapidly to meet
newer, more demanding data analysis requirements in areas such as the Next Generation
Sequencing (NGS).

This paper presents an overview of NGS followed by key technological and computational issues related to life sciences research, with specific reference to Sanger Institute, that are addressed through IBM’s Intel based eX5 systems. Based on real scientific experiment data sourced from IBM and Sanger Institute, we highlight how IBM eX5 servers scale up and are best suited for compute and memory intensive applications such as Velvet, ABySS and SOAP. Life sciences applications benefit not only from the flexibility, dense compute capacity, 512GB-1TB memory exclusively engineered in eX5 enterprise systems for Velvet kind of applications, but also from superior I/O, memory performance and high speed interconnects coupled with IBM’s acumen for simplified cluster administration, engineering innovation for unparalleled power and energy efficiencies.