Aiden Lab at Baylor College of Medicine Chooses WekaIO

Aiden Lab at the Baylor College of Medicine, a genome research facility, has selected the WekaIO‘s File System (WekaFS) to accelerate its genomics research.

Aiden Lab chose WekaFS to improve application performance and storage efficiency, and it was the only file system that could accelerate I/O operations in its GPU cluster.

It is part of The Center for Genome Architecture at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. The Center explores all aspects of genome structure – from the 1D sequence of the bases to the 3D folding that enables them to fit inside the nucleus of a cell. It is the 3D genome mapping center for the ENCyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Project at the US National Institutes of Health. The lab also forms part of the National Science Foundation Center for Theoretical Biological Physics and is a member of the 4D Nucleome Consortium and the Mouse Regulome Consortium. The Center supports the work of the DNA Zoo project, a consortium focused on facilitating nonhuman conservation efforts through the rapid generation and release of high-quality genomics resources.

After comparisons with Lustre and GPFS, Aiden Lab selected WekaFS, as the alternatives could not match the application performance improvements seen with WekaFS. The 3D-DNA pipeline, which generates genome assemblies, ran 3 times faster on WekaFS than when running on GPFS.

“The Aiden Lab cluster required a new solution to improve application performance and facilitate the deployment of a high-performance file system in a cloud computing environment. We required a solution that could support the team and their research related to Genome Architecture and felt that neither GPFS nor Lustre could keep up with our workload,” said David Weisz, lead scientific programmer, Aiden Lab.

“Our customers with high I/O requirements, like Aiden Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, are looking for alternatives to GPFS to improve application performance, while at the same time run the workflow effectively in the cloud, and WekaFS offers this winning combination,” said Glenn Wallin, senior sales executive, NordStar Group LLC. “Being a member of the WekaIO Innovation Network (WIN) program affords us the ability to offer the WekaFS modern file system to better assist life sciences organizations in Texas to adapt to their rapidly changing digital technical environments.“

“Aiden Lab is leading the charge on the research front by using our technology leadership to deliver application performance far superior to that of any legacy parallel file system. WekaFS has delivered a 3x improvement in performance at Aiden Lab and is enabling it to use its cloud infrastructure more effectively. WekaFS will improve overall productivity and empower researchers to become more efficient at analyzing results,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO, WekaIO.