Case Study: University of York advances water treatment research with Google Cloud Compute Engine

Biologists use Google Cloud to advance environmental research on water treatment in Yorkshire

The University of York, working with Google for Education through Google Cloud Platform and Compute Engine, needed a way to analyze massive microbial DNA datasets from Yorkshire Water’s digesters. Their existing high-performance computing setup struggled with the size and storage demands of long-read sequencing data, making it difficult to assemble genomes efficiently.

Google for Education, via Google Compute Engine and support from Cloud Technology Solutions, moved the workflow to cloud virtual machines with expanded memory and storage. The team completed the genome assembly pipeline for the first time, assembling 60 gigabases of microbial DNA in two weeks on a single VM setup, making the process faster, more accessible, and more affordable for future research.

University of York

James Chong

Professor