Case Study: Murdoch University achieves faster cattle‑tick genome sequencing with Amazon Web Services

Murdoch University - Customer Case Study

Murdoch University’s Centre for Comparative Genomics (CCG) needed to rapidly sequence the cattle-tick genome—a complex task because the tick genome is more than twice the size of the human genome and the parasite causes billions in livestock losses (about US$146M annually in northern Australia). Researchers struggled with public supercomputing resources that were unreliable, slow, and inflexible, which created delays, lost research time, and limited control over the scientific process.

The CCG migrated its work to AWS—using EC2, S3, Glacier, CloudFormation, SQS, and EC2 Spot Instances—to gain scalable compute, durable storage, reproducible architectures, message scheduling, and cost savings. The move sped up time-to-science (completing work months faster), enabled an international research consortium, accelerated discovery of novel tick proteins for vaccine development, attracted three industry partners, and gave researchers greater agility and control over their workflows.

Murdoch University

Adam Hunter

Associate Director, Centre for Comparative Genomics