IBM Storage wins HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award for enhancing non-invasive cancer detection

20 November 2024

 

Author
Denis Kennelly General Manager, IBM Storage

I’m honored to announce that an IBM Storage customer, the University of Birmingham in England, received the 2024 HPCwire Readers' Choice Award for the best use of high-performance computing in life science at the Supercomputing 24 conference in Atlanta, GA. The award celebrates the use of IBM Storage Scale software-defined file and object storage in sequencing plasma samples from pediatric cancer patients to accurately determine cancer type and recurrence without invasive biopsies.

According to HPCwire, “high-performance computing resources enabled efficient processing of multi-petabyte datasets, potentially revolutionizing cancer detection and monitoring in both children and adults.”

Life science applications typically place extreme demands on an organization’s infrastructure, requiring data storage that provides both high throughput and low latency. IBM Storage Scale software is ideal for these environments—designed for linear scaling of performance and capacity, with sub-millisecond latency and hundreds of gigabytes per second throughput and tens of millions of IOPs while addressing massive datasets. This architecture also helps eliminate data silos because multiple application APIs can access the same data, and analytics workloads can use output from one application to drive results to another.

The HPCwire award acknowledges the terrific work being done at the University of Birmingham, which consistently ranks among the UK's top universities for research, especially medical and life sciences, physics, and engineering. The university’s Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences is known globally for its cancer research, having contributed significant advancements to the understanding and treatment of the disease.

To maintain its reputation as a premier research institution, the university must ensure data is always available to a growing number of users running increasingly complex simulations. To meet these challenges, the organization provides Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR), a collection of IT resources available at no cost to its community and qualified external researchers.

IBM Storage Scale and IBM Storage Protect are key components of the system, increasing transparency around data’s location and who accesses it, and increasing its mobility within a diverse IT environment. The result is better data management, which helps the university’s more than 5,000 researchers harness the full potential of their ideas, technologies, and experimental results.

Whether they’re in product management, engineering, marketing, finance, sales, or any other role, the people in IBM Storage work hard every day, and I know I speak for the entire team when I say nothing makes it more worthwhile than when our products can have such a positive impact on peoples’ lives. My thanks to our team and to everyone at the University of Birmingham for their outstanding work.

Learn more about the University of Birmingham.

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