Case Study: Microsoft Research achieves genetic data analysis in days instead of years with Microsoft Azure

FaST-LMM and Windows Azure Put Genetics Research on Faster Track

Microsoft Research faced a classic big-data bottleneck: analyzing massive genomic datasets to find genetic causes of common diseases was limited by CPU and storage constraints. Traditional supercomputing approaches made genome-wide association studies—searching SNP pairs across thousands of individuals, such as the Wellcome Trust dataset—slow and costly, effectively stalling research that required hundreds of compute years.

By running the high‑speed FaST‑LMM algorithm on Microsoft Azure and using cloud storage and tens of thousands of cores, the team turned workloads that would take years into tasks completed in days or hours (about 125 compute years in roughly three days). The cloud-based solution not only accelerated SNP-pair analyses and enabled new genetic insights, it demonstrated a scalable path for moving high-performance research into the cloud and rapidly generating scientific results.

Microsoft Research

David Heckerman

Distinguished Scientist