Case Study: Wellcome Sanger Institute achieves 44% faster runtimes and 10% cost savings with Altair Mistral & Breeze

Sanger Institute Gets Fast, Agile, and Cloud-ready With Mistral and Breeze

The Wellcome Sanger Institute, a leading center for genomic discovery, needed to make a cancer genome pipeline portable and optimized for cloud deployment while handling massive data volumes (roughly 250 GB per sample). To diagnose and resolve I/O bottlenecks they worked with Altair, using Altair Mistral and Altair Breeze to profile pipeline I/O and assess cloud storage behavior on AWS.

Altair Mistral identified millions of tiny reads that were degrading shared-storage performance, and Altair Breeze showed the most cost-effective AWS storage option for the containerized workload. By applying Altair’s profiling insights—avoiding small reads/writes and tuning memory—the Institute cut run time from 32 to 18 hours and reduced project costs by about 10%.

Wellcome Sanger Institute

Keiran Raine

Cancer Researcher