Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute uses Platform LSF licences to crack chromosome 20Hinxton 12 March 2002 The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, working with Platform Computing, has completed the decoding of Chromosome 20, one of the 23 distinct DNA bundles that carry human genetic material. The results, part of the Human Genome Project, will help shed light on why people are genetically prone to diseases such as diabetes, obesity or eczema. Chromosome 20 also carries the gene that is suspected to make individuals more susceptible to contracting variant CJD.
Platform Computing's involvement has been crucial to Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute's continued success. Distributing the sequencing jobs is an enormous challenge for the Institute. At any one time, it processes as many as 500,000 jobs across its compute farm. However by using Platform LSF the Institute can actively manage the process of controlling and optimising its compute power to accelerate the time to discovery.
Phil Butcher, Head of IT at the Sanger Institute, explained: "The Human Genome Project has used enormous, scalable compute power to make the data available throughout the project. The Project is as much an exercise in IT and systems needs as in lab science and we and our partners will finish the genome years ahead of schedule partly because of our investment in flexible systems."
The Institute has also placed an order for an additional 600 Platform LSF licences, which will manage and optimise the compute power of the 400 Compaq Alpha DSL10s being used to sequence the genomic data at the Institute. Platform LSF workload management software enables and optimises the use of enterprise-wide resources, providing on-demand access to computing resources. The Institute has seen an acceleration of its job sequencing methods over the years, partly due to the
increased complexity of its genomic data and has used Platform LSF software to manage this increasing demand for compute power.
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is a supporter of Grid computing initiatives and is actively involved in the UK Grid Project. The project, developed for high-energy physics and genomic research, will facilitate the large scale sharing of resources, applications and compute power, enabling virtual organisations and a UK-wide distributed computing infrastructure.
Platform's distributed computing solutions are used in more than half of the Fortune 500 pharmaceutical and chemical companies. All of the major sequencing centers use Platform's distributed and Grid computing solutions to accelerate scientific research, including Celera Genomics, the European Bioinformatics Institute, Incyte Genomics, and the Sanger
Institute.
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