ARMONK, N.Y., March
23, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- A team led by researchers from
The Center for Genome Architecture (TC4GA) at Baylor College of Medicine have used technologies
from IBM (NYSE: IBM), Mellanox and NVIDIA to assemble the 1.2
billion letter genome of the Culex quinquefasciatus
mosquito, which carries West Nile virus. The new genome can help
enable scientists to better combat West Nile virus by identifying
vulnerabilities in the mosquito that the virus uses to spread.
The high performance computing (HPC) system dubbed "VOLTRON," is
based on the IBM Power Systems platform, which provides scalable
HPC capabilities necessary to accommodate a broad spectrum of
data-enabled research activities. Baylor
College of Medicine joins leading supercomputing agencies
globally – the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge and Lawrence
Livermore National Labs and the U.K. government's Science and
Technology Facilities Council's Hartree Centre – that have recently
selected IBM's Power Systems platform for cutting-edge HPC
research.
VOLTRON's 3D assembly is changing the way in which researchers
are able to sequence genomes, by using DNA folding patterns to
trace the genome as it crisscrosses the nucleus. The resulting
methodology is faster and less expensive. For example, while the
original Human Genome Project took ten years and cost $4 billion, 3D assembly produces a comparable
genome sequence in a few weeks and for less than $10,000.
Such efforts take on increased urgency when they are needed to
combat disease outbreaks, like the West Nile virus.
"Taking advantage of IBM POWER8 and Mellanox InfiniBand
interconnect, we are now able to change the way we assemble a
genome," said Olga Dudchenko, a
postdoctoral fellow at The Center for Genome Architecture at
Baylor College of Medicine. "And while
we originally created Voltron to sequence the human genome, the
method can be applied to a dizzying array of species. This gives us
an opportunity to explore mosquitoes, which carry diseases that
impact many people around the globe."
"3D assembly and IBM technology are a terrific combination: one
requires extraordinary computational firepower, which the other
provides," said Erez Lieberman
Aiden, Director of The Center for Genome Architecture.
The Center for Genome Architecture is working closely with
Mellanox to maximize their research capabilities with the VOLTRON
high-performance computing system. By leveraging Mellanox's
intelligent interconnect technology and acceleration engines, TC4GA
is able to provide its researchers with an efficient and scalable
platform to enhance genome sequencing in order to find cures for
the world's life-threatening diseases.
Key to Baylor's research breakthrough is a multi-year
collaboration between IBM and NVIDIA to design systems capable of
leveraging the POWER processor's open architecture to take
advantage of the NVIDIA® Tesla ® accelerated computing
platform.
Incorporated into the design of VOLTRON is POWER and Tesla
technology combination that allows Baylor researchers to handle
extreme amounts of data with incredible speed. Voltron consists of
a cluster of four systems, each featuring a set of eight NVIDIA
Tesla GPUs tuned by NVIDIA engineers to help Baylor's researchers
achieve optimum performance on their data-intensive genomic
research computations.
Additional material and images are available for download at:
http://aidenlab.org/dudchenkomediakit2017/
Media Contact
Scott
Cook
IBM Media Relations
scotty@us.ibm.com
720-395-2360
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SOURCE IBM