Seagate Gift Supports UC Santa Cruz Research on Genomic Storage

Ethan Miller, professor of computer science, directs the Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS).

Researchers in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz are working with industry partner Seagate Technologies plc on ways to structure and store massive amounts of genomic data.

Seagate has donated storage devices with a total capacity of 2.5PB to support this effort.

“This gift provides the basis for a major research program on storage of genomic data,” said Andy Hospodor, executive director, Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC), UC Santa Cruz.

“Seagate is pleased to be a part of this important research effort. The storage requirements for genomics are staggering and the potential for medical breakthroughs even larger,” said Mark Re, senior VP and CTO, Seagate.

The gift, valued at $250,000, includes 1PB of Seagate’s new Kinetic disk drives for object-based storage, plus an additional 1.5PB of traditional SATA HDDs for use in existing clusters within the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute.

Large-scale test bed
“This gives us a large-scale test bed that we can use to explore the organization of data for large-scale disk-based storage systems. We need to develop better ways to store and organize the vast quantities of data we’re generating,” said Ethan Miller, professor of computer science and director of the Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS), UCSC.

Miller and other storage systems researchers at UC Santa Cruz work closely with industry partners such as Seagate, and several of the center’s alumni and graduate students have been working at Seagate on the company’s latest disk technology. The Seagate storage donation will support research on ways to structure and store genomic data using object stores and open-source standards (APIs) for genomic data that are being developed by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health.

“Genomic storage is one of several areas of emerging interest where we’ll be looking at using Seagate’s new intelligent disks to build large-scale storage systems,” Miller said.

Genomics Institute
The donation also adds over a PB of storage capacity to the genomics storage cluster maintained by the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. For Benedict Paten, a research scientist at the Genomics Institute, it’s all about speeding up the processing of genomic data.

“We in genomics know that we have a big data problem,” Paten said. “We need to be able to compute on much larger volumes of data than we have before. The amount of genomic data is growing exponentially, and we haven’t been keeping up.“

Part of the solution, he said: is distributed processing of large data sets in which the processing is done where the data are stored, instead of downloading the data over a network for processing. “Now we can put a lot of disks on the compute nodes for efficient distributed computation over large amounts of data. This donation is really important for our big data genomics efforts at UC Santa Cruz,” Paten said.