ARMONK, N.Y., May 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM)
today announced the deployment of its IBM solutions as the compute
and storage infrastructure for Sidra Medical and Research Center
(Sidra).
Sidra, a groundbreaking hospital, biomedical research and
educational institution, chose IBM solutions to manage and store
clinical genome sequencing data as well as to provide the
organization's biomedical informatics technology infrastructure
capabilities that will serve as a national resource. The IBM
platform is used for data management and storage, bioinformatics
and High Performance Computing (HPC).
One of the first programs Sidra used the IBM technology platform
was for the Qatar Genome Programme (QGP) 1. The
QGP is a large national genome medical research project, which aims
to develop personalized healthcare therapies for the Qatari
population. Sidra is a key partner of the QGP and is responsible
for sequencing, analyzing and providing the data management for
whole genome sequences from the population. Sidra has sequenced
over 3000 samples in Phase I and has embarked on the sequencing and
analysis for Phase II of the QGP.
"Sidra has undertaken to implement personalized medicine to
better meet the unmet needs of the women and children in
Qatar and beyond. Biomedical
informatics plays a central role in bringing this concept to life,"
said Dr. Rashid Al-Ali Division Chief of the Biomedical Informatics
Division at Sidra. "This is why we hired a multidisciplinary team
of experts from all over the world, invested in leading
technologies and chosen vendors like IBM to help enhance our
approach to offering personalized care to the women and children of
Qatar. Our implementation of
technologies goes beyond than meeting Sidra's needs – as we have
the basic building blocks in place to be considered a national
resource in the county and build local capacity."
A number of IBM solutions underpin Sidra's analytics and data
architecture, including:
- IBM Flash Storage systems to accelerate access to critical meta
data by the Sidra community;
- IBM Software defined infrastructure as a workload and resource
manager, to ease the management of big data analytics, and to scale
up capabilities to manage HPC analytics involving hundreds of
thousands of jobs and vast amounts of data.
"The Sidra and IBM work effort is unique – it was a joint
collaboration between our bioinformatics experts who led the
complex analysis component and built the pipelines while IBM
customised the system to ensure best performance and ease of use,"
said Dr. Mohamed-Ramzi Temanni, Manager, Bioinformatics Technical
Group at Sidra Medical and Research Center. "Analyzing hundreds of
samples in parallel on a regular basis requires a robust HPC system
to handle the load properly. From our experience, IBM systems has
proven to be reliable in helping us address this technical
requirement."
Performing analysis on each sample takes between two to seven
days. Failures at any point in the analysis of the data can be very
costly as it would require each job to restart from the beginning.
Using IBM Spectrum software provides Sidra high reliability to
manage the application pipeline to help meet its deadlines.
Since deploying the IBM platform, Sidra has completed hundreds
of thousands of computing tasks comprising millions of files and
directories, without experiencing system downtime. Overall, Sidra
has reduced its time-to-completion for long running jobs while
increasing its resource utilization substantially. As a result,
Sidra completed its requirements for Phase I of the QGP ahead of
time.
"Sidra's remit for the Qatar Genome Program is an ambitious
genomics medical research project in terms of compute and data
scope," said Dr. Robert Eades,
Research Advisor, IBM Middle East & Africa. "To most effectively manage and
analyze a large number of whole genome sequences for population
genomics, Sidra chose IBM as one of its key players to build a
long-term technology foundation for medical analytics research at
this scale."
IBM at Bio-IT World
As a Bio-IT World Platinum
sponsor IBM will deliver several presentations during the event,
including the following, which take place on Wednesday, May 24th:
-
Data Computing: Advances in Computing Applications for Big Data;
2:55pm ET;
- Bioinformatics, 12:00pm ET;
-
Clinical Research & Translational Informatics: Transforming Biological Data to Clinical
Development, 5:00pm ET:
In addition IBM solutions will appear across the Bio-IT World
exhibition floor: IBM Storage Spectrum Scale within IBM Business
Partner, DDN booth #357. IBM Aspera in booth #348 and IBM Cloud
Object Storage in Booth #554.
For more on IBM Storage, visit www.ibm.com/systems/storage.
About Sidra Medical and Research Center
Sidra Medical
and Research Center will be a groundbreaking hospital, research and
education institution, focusing on the health and wellbeing of
children and women regionally and globally.
Sidra represents the vision of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint
Nasser who serves as its Chairperson. The high-tech facility will
not only provide world-class patient care but will also help build
Qatar's scientific expertise and
resources.
Sidra will be a fully digital facility, incorporating the most
advanced information technology applications in all its functions.
Designed by renowned architect Cesar
Pelli, Sidra features a main hospital building and a
separate outpatient clinic.
Sidra opened its Outpatient Clinic on 1
May 2016 and offers outpatient services for women and
children through a referral based system in partnership with other
healthcare providers in Qatar.
Sidra is also part of a dynamic research and education
environment in Qatar and through
strong partnerships with leading institutions around the world,
Sidra is creating an intellectual ecosystem to help advance
scientific discovery through investment in medical research. For
more information please visit www.sidra.org.
1 – 'About Qatar Genome Programme' –
http://www.qatargenome.org.qa/
Contact:
Greg Vitarelli
617-455-9627
vitarelli@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM