Case Study: University of Miami cuts genomics analysis time from 72 to 17 hours with DataDirect Networks (DDN)

Computation Center Accelerates Time to Link Viruses & Gastrointestinal Cancers

The University of Miami’s Center for Computational Science (CCS) supports more than 2,000 researchers across medicine, marine and atmospheric sciences, engineering and the arts, running data‑intensive, interdisciplinary HPC projects—especially next‑generation sequencing—that generate massive I/O, petabyte‑scale datasets and tens of thousands of files per genome. CCS needed a flexible, high‑performance file system and integrated data‑lifecycle solution to handle very large parallel jobs and many small serial jobs, absorb 10× “data‑in‑flight” surges during analysis, and dramatically shorten time‑to‑results for genomics workflows.

DDN’s GS12K scale‑out storage with embedded IBM GPFS provided a single, centrally managed platform with transparent data movement, high throughput and low‑IOPS capability and petabyte scalability. The deployment enabled CCS to process inputs from 15 Illumina HiSeq instruments and external datasets (TCGA, dbGaP), reduce genome mapping and SNP analysis from 72 to 17 hours, scale without added complexity, and support discoveries such as links between certain viruses and gastrointestinal cancers.

University of Miami

Nicholas Tsinoremas

Director of the Center for Computational Science