Background

In 2016, China’s precision-medicine program was officially launched. It aims to apply modern genetic technology, molecular imaging and bioinformatics, combined with patients’ living environments and clinical data, to build a whole-genome database and sample bank for the Chinese population, achieve precise disease classification and diagnosis, and formulate personalized, targeted prevention and treatment plans.

Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Capital Medical University, is one of the world’s three major neurosurgical research centers and a clinical, research and teaching base for neurosurgery in Asia. Tiantan Hospital is world-renowned in brain and neurological fields and was among the first to launch precision-medicine research on cerebrovascular disease, including precision-medicine cohorts, omics studies of onset and prognosis, pharmacogenomics, and cerebrovascular big-data research. To meet the computing-model needs of frontier research, Tiantan Hospital launched construction of a system for high-throughput genomics data processing and intelligent pathological-image recognition (the genomics system).

Customer Requirements

Tiantan Hospital’s genomics system will be used to store, process and compute diagnostic information, omics data and high-resolution imaging data of the clinical trial and research center, and to process and analyze DNA testing data from about 3,000 patients a year at the single-gene neurological-disease diagnostic center. It will provide data analysis for the National Clinical Research Center for Neurological Diseases, and meet the needs of an intelligent medical-data diagnostic assistant and a nationwide omics database.

Given these goals, the storage system must offer high aggregate read/write bandwidth and a high-speed storage network of more than 100G for applications such as genome sequencing, meeting gene-data processing and computing needs; fine-grained permission management so that data-management services can be provided to the national center, together with a visual interface for convenient quota management; and, because clinical data are the center’s core and extremely valuable, high reliability to safeguard data security.

Solution

Drawing on years of experience in biological genomics, Sugon built a cloud-storage solution for the industry. The Sugon ParaStor distributed storage system serves as the storage resource. ParaStor delivers aggregate bandwidth of more than 40 GB/s and a 100 Gb/s EDR InfiniBand high-speed storage network, addressing both high aggregate bandwidth for massive large-file storage and high IOPS for small-file storage in biological genomics applications.

ParaStor also provides a 10 Gb/s Ethernet storage network for the cloud-desktop system, ensuring efficient sharing of biological data. It supports NIS, Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP and other permission-management functions, and can be integrated with the customer’s existing permission systems so that data sharing remains under full control. It supports five quota types and a convenient quota-management interface.

Data from genomic research grow extremely fast. Sugon’s ParaStor distributed storage system can meet requirements for processing capability and scalability through linear growth in performance and capacity.

Through multiple technical measures, ParaStor ensures high reliability and high availability from the physical layer to the logical layer, safeguarding the storage, management, application and sharing of clinical data.

Customer Benefits

With Sugon’s help, Tiantan Hospital completed its genomics system, providing reliable technical support for in-depth analysis, mining and sharing of clinical resources, and laying a solid foundation for an intelligent medical-data diagnostic assistant and a nationwide omics database.