Scientists update IT to support DNA queries

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) has installed a cluster of high-performance servers to handle the eight million online queries it receives every week.

The charitable trust has been sequencing the genomes of humans, chimps, rats, mosquitoes and other creatures for more than a decade, to provide an in-depth resource for medical researchers. It now has nearly one million of these sequences, which it is making freely available via its Ensembl.org web site in conjunction with the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Phil Butcher, head of IT at the WTSI, says scientists accessing the site can view these sequences for research purposes, and also use various online tools to analyse the data.

One such tool, the sequence search and alignment by hashing algorithm (SSAHA), matches and aligns DNA sequences, a massively intensive task that places significant strain on the WTSI's systems.

The WTSI has replaced its ageing DEC AlphaServer system with Altix servers from Silicon Graphics running on Linux, and capable of supporting up to 192GB of memory.

'Trying to compare DNA structures takes enormous computer capabilities. When writing applications such as SSAHA, large memory systems are required
by the hashing algorithms,' said Butcher.

He is now planning his IT needs for the years ahead, as biological research becomes more closely reliant on technology.

'In the next five years, we will move into handling petabytes of data as we take on projects involving image analysis and tissue samples,' said Butcher.

'Things such as large-scale population surveys will be especially relevant, so we need to research how to handle large- scale data management and other technology issues.'