Empowering COVID-19 Research with Cutting-Edge Tech

TGen Case Study

The 2020 outbreak of the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has united the world in a common fight, at the forefront of which are medical workers, researchers, and scientists. As an organization dedicated to “conducting groundbreaking research with life-changing results,” the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, is a part of the global medical community that actively seeks ways to treat and eliminate COVID-19.

TGen is an Arizona-based research institute that has been conducting research on numerous human diseases and forms of cancer since 2002. To help the global fight against COVID-19, TGen is working to develop a centralized, aggregated dataset that can automatically pull COVID-19 sequenced genomes and other related data from multiple sources. This dataset can help improve research, data analysis, and increase understanding of the viral genome.

CHALLENGE

• Lack of a shared data repository of SARS CoV-2 genome and related metadata
• Time-consuming data analysis processes
• Difficulties in sharing knowledge between researchers globally
• Limited infrastructure capabilities to execute diverse computational workkflows

SOLUTION

phoenixNAP’s custom Hardware-as-a-Service solutions powered by Intel Xeon Dual Gold 6258R CPUs, Intel NVMe’s (P4610) using Intel VROC, Intel NICs, and Intel Optane persistent memory, expanding memory capacity (128Gb DRAM + 1536GB Intel PMem); Intel® Tofino™ Programmable Ethernet Switch Products.

RESULTS

• Fast data processing with Intel PMem compared to traditional RAM
• Centralized platform for global data access and analysis
• Integrated database for more efficient research on a global scale
• Optimized infrastructure for compute-heavy workloads