IBM and CLC bio Deliver Combined Turnkey Genomics Sequencing Analytics Solution

Today at the Bio-IT World conference in Boston, IBM and CLC bio announced a combined turnkey next generation sequencing data analytics solution. The combined platform is a scalable end-to-end solution that integrates a computing cluster build on advanced IBM hardware, CLC Genomics Server software for large-scale genomics sequencing data analysis, and CLC Genomics Workbench client software for analyzing, comparing, and visualizing high-throughput sequencing data.

“It is imperative that we serve our customers with a platform that is easy to deploy and support, delivering the power to perform their next generation sequencing workload. Molecular biologists and clinicians need these tools to realize the promise of personalized medicine," says Janis Landry-Lane, Director of World-wide Deep Computing at IBM. "We are privileged to work with CLC bio to deliver this powerful turnkey next generation sequencing data analysis solution."

Director of Global Partner Relations at CLC bio, Mikael Flensborg, adds, "By combining our world-leading bioinformatics software with IBM's excellent hardware and many years of expertise in setting up and supporting eloborate IT systems, we're delivering a powerful turnkey analysis platform, which will enable institutions and scientists to handle the demands of high-throughput sequencing data analysis.”

The cluster compute nodes are IBM System x® 3550 M4 rack servers powered by Intel® Xeon® E5-2650 processors. The nodes are connected to an IBM Storwize® V7000 Unified network attached storage system, which consolidates block and file workloads. Storwize V7000 Unified systems support file data storage using the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS™). GPFS has the leading file system performance and is utilized in the world’s largest HPC installations. With GPFS, CLC bio software is leveraging a shared-disk file management solution that provides fast, reliable access to NGS data for optimizing performance. The turnkey analysis platform comes in three different configurations, ranging from 48 CPU cores and 192 GBs of memory to 192 CPU cores and 768 GBs of memory, depending on the analysis requirements of the individual customer.