At the BioIT World Europe Conference, Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) announced the launch of IlluminaCompute, a fully integrated computing solution for its Genome Analyzer sequencing platform. Bringing together Illumina’s powerful sequencing software with high-performance blade servers from Dell’s OEM and Life Sciences Group and modular storage capacity from Isilon Systems, Inc., IlluminaCompute creates a flexible and scalable system for human scale genomic data analysis. The new solution conserves IT resources by providing centralized high-performance computational and storage infrastructure, compared to the support required for individual, decentralized analysis servers.
“Illumina and our IT partners collaborated to address an unmet need for highly scalable computing capabilities that can keep pace with the remarkable growth in the throughput of the Genome Analyzer,” said Scott Kahn, vice president and chief information officer. “No other genomics provider currently offers a turn-key solution like IlluminaCompute that can be customized and extended for small and growing sequencing facilities and also scaled to meet the needs of larger genome centers.” Because IlluminaCompute can be quickly and easily added to or reconfigured with support from Illumina, researchers can keep pace with changes to their computing needs with virtually no system down-time.
IlluminaCompute is a unique bundling of hardware, informatics software and high-availability storage that is delivered and supported directly by Illumina’s Customer Solutions team. The system is tuned specifically for a high-throughput sequence analysis workflow. Server and disk management overhead is kept to an absolute minimum, reducing the need for dedicated IT and bioinformatics staff. The result is a greatly empowered lab. IlluminaCompute provides sufficient processing resources for computational-heavy analysis that requires clustered processing and shared data repositories, such as genome assembly, deep sequencing and metagenomics research.