Case Study: The Pirbright Institute accelerates viral research and real-time outbreak response with Atos supercomputer

Research center safeguards livestock and humans from the threat of viral diseases with Atos supercomputer with Intel® processors

The Pirbright Institute, based in Surrey, England, is the UK’s flagship centre for predicting, detecting and responding to viral diseases of livestock. Facing rising demand for computation that outstripped its legacy mix of servers, clusters and workstations, Pirbright needed a versatile high‑performance platform to accelerate genome assembly, epidemiology and advanced analytics. To meet this challenge it turned to Atos, deploying an Atos supercomputer powered by Intel® Xeon® processors with heterogeneous nodes to support diverse, data‑intensive workloads.

Atos, working through its Life Sciences Center of Excellence, delivered a bespoke HPC environment combining Intel® Xeon® E5 primary nodes with large‑memory E7‑4809 nodes (1.5 TB memory) and about 0.5 PB of disk storage. The unified Atos platform eliminated costly data movement between systems, sped sequencing and analysis within containment, and enabled real‑time tracing of outbreaks and faster method development. The result is higher throughput, lower management overhead and accelerated time‑to‑results—strengthening The Pirbright Institute’s ability to protect livestock and public health.

The Pirbright Institute

Bryan Charleston

Director and CEO