Martinos Center at Massachusetts General Hospital Chooses Vast Data

Challenge
The Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital is one of the premier research centers devoted to development and application of advanced biomedical imaging technologies.

The medical imaging researchers at the center must continuously find new ways to leverage AI algorithms to analyze the raw, uncompressed data generated by their imaging systems. But with hundreds of subjects and thousands of scans every year, they struggled to affordably capture and store enormous volumes of raw image data, while still enabling fast data access to hundreds of researchers’ AI initiatives.

Solution
In 2020, the center engaged Vast Data to help accelerate and streamline their medical image research. With the growing need to capture and record every bit of MRI and PET scan data, it selected Vast Data’s Universal Storage to help transition them to an all-flash solution, rendering previous hard-drive storage systems obsolete.

Vast Data’s combination of low-cost flash,-efficient data protection and data reduction enabled the center to affordably deploy multiple-petabytes of all-flash storage for the first time. Meanwhile, Vast Data’s Disaggregated, Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture provided the scalability and performance needed to support 4 NVIDIA DGX-A100 servers for any GPU deep-learning and training applications. With a high-bandwidth, low-latency RDMA-capable fabric connecting the compute and storage end-to-end, the infrastructure catered to the insatiable appetite from researchers wanting access to the entirety of the image catalog, without needing to move or copy data across the datacenter.

Results
Vast Data’s flash economics eliminate the compromise between price and performance found in legacy storage solutions. As a result, the center has started a strategic shift to all-flash Universal Storage for existing research data as well as the eventual addition of clinical data. This scale-out solution also eliminated the complexity and operational headaches they experienced with their previous HPC storage technologies. It delivers the performance of an all-flash, RDMA-enabled parallel file system with the administrative simplicity of a scale-out NAS using standard NFS protocols.

“Vast delivered an all-flash solution at a cost that not only allowed us to upgrade to all-flash and eliminate our storage tiers, but also saved us enough to pay for more GPUs to accelerate our research. This combination has enabled us to explore new deep-learning techniques that have unlocked invaluable insights in image reconstruction, image analysis, and image parcellation both today and for years to come,” said Bruce Rosen, Martinos Center executive director.

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