Altos Computing, a subsidiary of Acer, has announced a new accelerated genome solution in close collaboration with WASAI Technology, a big-data acceleration expert focusing on human genome sequencing as a global launch at BIO-IT World Conference & Expo 2019.
This joint development effort utilizes high-performance Altos BrainSphere AI computing platform combined with WASAI’s proprietary software to create a solution that is faster for genome sequencing without sacrificing accuracy, while also bringing cost savings to make this crucial technology accessible to more hospitals and research institutions.
“We’ve definitely seen an upward trend when it comes to clients requesting fully integrated systems to handle the growing demands of big data analysis,” said Jackie Lee, President at Altos Computing. “Working closely with the WASAI team allowed us to ensure their algorithms scaled efficiently on Altos BrainSphere AI servers and FPGA accelerators, which is why we were able to see such an improvement in speed and accuracy.”
Built on the Altos R380 F4 platform, the company’s accelerator platform supports industry-leading CPUs,24 DDR4 Memory DIMM slots, and high-speed IO for blazing fast data processing. For added energy efficiency, 80 PLUS Titanium-level efficiency power supplies are used. Altos’ expertise allows them to partner with software companies to create application-specific tailored for the bioinformatics industry.
For example, WASAI optimized a native BWA-MEM algorithm on Altos BrainSphere AI servers and field programmable gate array (FPGA) card, integrating GATK Best Practice pipeline which has the best performance, and drastically sped up the time needed for human genome sequencing.
The software provides a painless upgrade process for the secondary analysis of germline pipelines. Users can also complete their analysis including alignment, sorting, marking as duplicates and variant calling without having to switch workflows.
With more clinical researchers and hospitals relying on big data analysis, the new solution of genome sequencing from Altos is ideal for such facilities which require data to be processed quickly and accurately. The joint solution allows germline analysis to be completed in an astonishing eight hours, compared to the 33 hours it takes using previous methods.
This not only saves time but also achieves cost-efficiency since more genome data can be run in a single facility. Thanks to its parallelism, the new solution also allows facilities to accelerate native algorithms for results that are just as precise and consistent as the original software. Altos’s support network also gives medical facility staff and system integrators access to developmental and after-service resources.
