Case Study: Public Health England achieves 16x faster pathogen genome analysis and delivers results in hours with DataDirect Networks' EXAScaler storage

Fighting The Spread of Infectious Disease With DDN WOS

Public Health England (PHE), the UK government agency that protects and improves national health, tasked its MS bioinformatics unit with launching a centralized next‑generation sequencing (NGS) service to rapidly characterize pathogens. The existing infrastructure could only process a handful of samples at a time, so PHE needed a high‑performance computing and data‑management solution with massive parallel I/O, multi‑tier storage, rapid turnaround and the ability to support nationwide collaboration and outbreak response.

PHE partnered with integrator OCF and deployed DDN’s SFA10K EXAScaler with Lustre, plus DDN WOS object storage and iRODS for lifecycle and collaboration management, creating an HPC cluster, active archive and private cloud. The new platform delivers ~16× faster processing, enabling roughly 192–200 genomes to be analyzed in parallel and results to be returned in hours instead of days, while supporting large‑scale archiving, data sharing and rapid public‑health interventions.

Public Health England