1. Project Requirements

“Scientific discoveries should not stay in the laboratory; they should become new tests or treatments that can be used in the clinic.” That was the earliest statement of translational medicine, put forward at the start of the 21st century.

Translational medicine breaks the barrier between the clinic and the laboratory and connects basic medical research with clinical care. In China, it has become a major national focus in biomedicine.

2. Solution

Sugon helped Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (Ruijin Hospital) build a sequencing-module computing platform for in-depth analysis and mining of clinical resources, raising large-scale data-mining capability—including medical-data retrieval, statistical analysis, and graphical presentation—and advancing translational-medicine research.

Sugon provided Ruijin Hospital with a compute-storage network, a management network, the GridView cluster management and scheduling system, an application development environment, and an online operations system covering the full lifecycle. The system is used mainly for gene-sequencing applications. Sequencing software such as SOAP2, BWA, BWASW, VCAKE, and QSRA generates intermediate data during computation, so storage performance directly determines how long the full compute process takes and the performance requirements are stringent.

Sugon ParaStor distributed storage meets processing-power and scalability needs through linear growth in performance and capacity, and it uses multiple techniques to guarantee high reliability and high availability from the physical layer to the logical layer, connecting to many sequencing packages and business applications. To speed delivery and go-live and to protect after-sales service, customers can use the Sugon EasyOP online operations platform to contact industry-experienced experts for remote cluster optimization at any time, and to book on-site tuning through EasyOP.

Data from genomic research is growing about 10× every 12–18 months, and life-science demand for computing will become broader and stricter. Going forward, Sugon will work with more life-science customers to provide effective performance assurance and technical support.

3. Customer Benefits

The sequencing-module computing platform for in-depth analysis and mining of clinical resources raises large-scale data-mining capability—including medical-data retrieval, statistical analysis, and graphical presentation—and advances translational-medicine research.

The National Center for Translational Medicine (Shanghai), built under Ruijin Hospital, focuses on diseases that threaten the health of the Chinese population, including hematologic malignancies such as leukemia, gastrointestinal tumors, metabolic diseases such as diabetes, and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases such as coronary heart disease and hypertension—turning papers on the page into new clinical treatments and joining forces against major disease.