Accelerating genomic workload performance

QMUL is part of the Russell Group and is ranked fifth in the UK in terms of research quality. Integral to this ranking is its study of genomics, which requires high computing and processing power. IT services has a fundamental role to play in supporting this research, and with the need to cater to students and influential researchers, the institution decided to research the market and with the support of its channel partner, OCF, looked for the latest cutting-edge technology with performance and optimization.

With a shared NVMe platform in place, QMUL will be able to accelerate the performance of the fast-tier scratch space behind a distributed file system to support genomic sequencing. The high performance and capacity of E8 Storage NVMe-over-Fabrics system will be used for both data and metadata, enabling QMUL to push more jobs through the cluster at a faster rate. The previous high-performance system that the university used to support its genomics research was no longer fast enough to support its needs. Upon seeing the new performance benchmarks published by E8 Storage, the institution decided to upgrade, opting for the E8-D24 array to support genomics and moving the existing storage to a bulk storage tier. With E8 Storage, QMUL now has equipment that can scale for the future and deliver the fastest performance speed in the industry.

“Performance and data optimization are essential to the work behind genomic processing, and E8 Storage overcomes the traditional storage constraints with its first-to-market shared NVMe storage platform,” commented Tom King, Assistant Director for Research, IT Services at Queen Mary University of London. “The team have been extremely responsive right from the start, and we were able to discuss our main use case and pain points to see how the technology would enable us to overcome this. In addition, we were extremely pleased with the latest benchmark performance tests which showed E8 Storage as a leader in NVMe.”

Mahesh Pancholi, business development manager at OCF noted: “OCF are pleased to be working with E8 Storage to provide the industry leading NVMe-over-Fabric solution to QMUL. The combination of great performance figures and integration with IBM Spectrum Scale make the E8 Storage appliance a great way for QMUL to provide a high-performance scratch tier to their cutting-edge researchers. OCF are proud to have been working with QMUL to expand their cluster and provide cutting edge technologies and services to their world-class researchers.”