Case Study: University of British Columbia identifies 130,000 new viruses in 11 days with Amazon Web Services

University of British Columbia Identifies 130,000 New Viruses in 11 Days

The University of British Columbia faced the challenge of analyzing massive, publicly available genomic datasets to better understand the origins and evolution of COVID-19 and other viruses. Using Amazon Web Services, including Amazon S3-based data access and AWS compute resources, UBC researcher Artem Babaian and the Serratus project were able to collaborate on data at unprecedented scale.

Amazon Web Services enabled the team to search about 20 petabytes of mirrored Sequence Read Archive data with Amazon EC2 instances, leading to the discovery of 130,000 novel RNA viruses in just 11 days. This breakthrough was 10 times more than had been identified in the previous century of virology research, demonstrating the scale, speed, and cost efficiency achieved with Amazon Web Services.

University of British Columbia

Artem Babaian

Serratus Project Lead