Case Study: WEHI Accelerates Life Sciences Research with VAST Data

Life Sciences Leader Powers Next-gen Research Computing With Universal Storage

WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research), Australia’s leading biomedical research institute, needed a faster, more scalable storage foundation for data-heavy workloads such as Cryo-EM, AlphaFold, genomics, and other life sciences applications. Its legacy storage approach struggled with the huge mix of large and small files, random I/O patterns, and performance bottlenecks that slowed research pipelines and limited throughput.

VAST Data implemented its Universal Storage platform to accelerate data collection and analysis across WEHI’s research environment. With VAST Data, WEHI reported CryoSPARC running 5 to 8 times faster, Relion 2D classification up to 17 times faster, and Samtools up to 3.5 times faster; the institute also increased capacity from 50 simultaneous jobs to more than 1,000 while keeping interactive users unaffected, and now sees over 30 GB/s and more than 200,000 IOPS.

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Tim Martin

Senior ITS Research Systems Engineer