As Zhejiang’s major life-and-health science and innovation hub, Liangzhu Laboratory has initially built key technology platforms that can support the full chain of medical innovation and entrepreneurship. Liangzhu Laboratory and Sugon recently joined to build a high-performance cryo-EM platform, opening a path at the sub-nanometer scale and accelerating targeted-drug development.

Cryo-electron microscopy is used for ultra-low-temperature frozen sample preparation and transfer in scanning electron microscopy, allowing direct observation of liquids, semi-liquids, and electron-beam-sensitive samples. With this technique, researchers can visualize the dynamics of biological change. Cryo-EM helps pharmaceutical companies develop drugs and greatly accelerates R&D.

To meet laboratory needs, the cryo-EM storage platform faces these challenges: several terabytes of off-instrument data per day; different IOPS needs by file type; and one storage system supporting multiple application scenarios.

Cryo-EM platform data grow extremely fast. Sugon ParaStor scales to the exabyte level, with linear growth in performance and capacity, meeting processing-power and scalability needs. A 100 Gb/s EDR InfiniBand high-speed storage network efficiently meets high aggregate bandwidth for large medical files and high IOPS for small files.

ParaStor also fuses file, object, block, and HDFS protocols, truly unifying massive heterogeneous data. Extreme file-storage performance helps break barriers in off-instrument data capture and transfer, making preprocessing, visualization, and 2D/3D analysis more efficient. ParaStor distributed storage also uses multiple techniques to guarantee high reliability and high availability from the physical layer to the logical layer.