Garvan Selects Dell EMC for HPC Infrastructure

The Garvan Institute of Medical Research has selected Dell EMC to deliver a high-performance computing (HPC) system for Garvan’s Data Intensive Computer Engineering (DICE) group, designed to push scientific boundaries and transform the way genomic research is currently performed in Australia.

Garvan’s genomic research focuses on understanding how variations in each of our DNA sequences contributes to health and disease. Through genome sequencing and analysis of people, with and without a range of conditions, Garvan’s research is helping to drive precision medicine. This enables the delivery of the right medicine to the right person at the right time, helps to assess predisposition for a disease, and predicts adverse reactions to certain drugs. Garvan has already seen significant success in identifying the DNA changes that underpin cancer and immune, cardiac, mitochondrial and other diseases.

To store, analyse and use this genomic information effectively, Garvan requires large computational resources and data storage. Each person’s genomic data contains over 6 billion bases and around 5 million genetic variants, taking up to 700 hours to process. The Dell EMC HPC infrastructure, built on 14th generation PowerEdge technologies, with accelerated computing and Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor and FPGA, enables researchers to leverage best-of-breed architecture that can handle scientific workloads and push the boundaries of what’s possible. The new infrastructure will expand on Garvan’s existing on-premise system–not only supporting traditional computational analysis and simulation, but offering extensive big data analytics and deep learning capabilities.

“The technology has transformed the way we do science,” says Dr. Warren Kaplan, chief of Informatics at Garvan’s Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics. “It’s given us the ability to transform Garvan into a data-driven medical research institute, and the more genomes we sequence, the more we’re able to use that information to inform future studies.”

Learn more: Dell EMC for HPC