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Congratulations, Team Baylor! - Inside DNAnexus

Written by Frances Liu | May 5, 2014 2:59:22 PM

This week our friends and collaborators at Baylor College of Medicine’s Human Genome Sequencing Center were recognized with a Bio-IT World Best Practices Award for their work on the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) Consortium.  It’s well-deserved praise for an important translational research project, and DNAnexus is honored to have been part of the team.

This year, grand prize winners were named in five life sciences categories highlighting best practices in clinical & health, IT infrastructure & HPC, research & drug discovery, informatics, and knowledge management. The ceremony took place at the World Trade Center in Boston, where awards were presented by Bio-IT World Editor Allison Proffitt and William Van Etten, a founding member of BioTeam.

Baylor’s Narayanan Veeraraghavan said of the news, “This is a great achievement to be recognized at Bio-IT World for the work we’ve done with high-performance cloud computing. With DNAnexus’ help, we have been able to operate at scale, store immense amounts of data, work with our collaborators and beat short deadlines – all of which would have been prohibitively expensive or extremely challenging to accomplish using local resources.”

This project represented the largest genomic analysis ever performed in the cloud at the time it was completed and was an exciting validation of the scale at which the DNAnexus platform can perform. Over the course of a four-week period, approximately 3.3 million core-hours of DNAnexus computational time were used to analyze more than 14,000 genomes or exomes, generating 430TB of results and nearly 1PB of data that we are still hosting for further analysis.

We look forward to working on more massive projects and congratulate all the winners of this year’s Best Practice Awards. They are an inspiration as we drive closer to a fully realized vision of precision medicine.

For more information on the CHARGE project, please check out this use case.