Case Study: Broad Institute achieves 400% faster human-genome analysis with Google Cloud Platform

Broad Institute Discovering human health revelations hidden in DNA

The Broad Institute, a research partnership of MIT, Harvard and affiliated hospitals, studies human genomics to uncover the molecular basis of disease. As data volumes and sequencing throughput grew—roughly one genome’s worth of sequence data every 12 minutes—the institute’s on‑premises servers could no longer keep up, creating storage, processing and security bottlenecks that threatened research velocity and collaboration.

Broad built “Genomes in the Cloud” on Google Cloud Platform, using Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, the Google Genomics API and containerized tools (GATK, Picard) to scale compute and storage on demand while enforcing privacy and access controls. The move made analysis roughly four times faster, accommodates spikes in workload, protects sensitive genomic data, and enables secure, easy data sharing so researchers can process thousands of samples without delay.

Broad Institute

Niall Lennon

Senior Director