Curoverse Announces New Infrastructure Software for Precision Medicine, Genomics and Bioinformatics

Boston, MA (PRWEB) April 14, 2015

Curoverse today announced the public beta of cloud and on-premise solutions for organizations and individuals using the new Arvados open source software platform to manage, process, and share genomic and biomedical data.

The explosion in genomic and biomedical data generated for precision medicine is creating significant new IT infrastructure challenges for research institutions, clinical labs, and pharmaceutical companies, said Alexander Wait Zaranek, PhD, chief scientist at Curoverse. We built Arvados to provide a modern distributed computing platform that addresses the unique data management and processing requirements of the medical and life sciences industries.

The Arvados project was originally started by a team of scientists and engineers led by Dr. Zaranek at Harvard Medical School to manage the genomic and biomedical data being collected for major research projects such as the Harvard Personal Genome Project. Now an independent open source project, the new Arvados platform is available to research and clinical institutions around the world.

Biomedical informatics and big data computing infrastructure are essential to developing and delivering precision medicine, said Isaac Kohane, co-director at the Harvard Medical School Center for Biomedical Informatics. Its now possible to deliver more individually targeted medical care because were making sense of the molecular data that uniquely describe each patient, but precision medicine requires powerful new software infrastructure such as Arvados to handle the flood of new biomedical data.

Curoverse is supporting Arvados deployments both in the cloud and on-premise in customer data centers. The company is implementing Arvados pilots at major medical and research institutions in the US and Europe including projects at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Medical School, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Were already working with more than 20 petabytes of genomic data and seeing firsthand the incredible challenges involved in processing these massive data sets, said Joshua Randall, senior scientific manager in Human Genetics Informatics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Were now planning the next generation of our bioinformatics infrastructure and are piloting Arvados as a foundation for that new infrastructure.

Intel Corporation is helping to support the on-premise Curoverse pilot program by providing funding for equipment being deployed at several institutions, including the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, a research computing center operated by five of the largest research universities in Massachusetts, under a program sponsored by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.

Through our work with leading medical and research institutions worldwide, were witnessing the new computing challenges created by genomics and precision medicine, said Ketan Paranjape, general manager of life sciences at Intel. Were supporting the Curoverse pilot program because Arvados provides new open source software for managing and processing genomic data that lets organizations take advantage of the unique capabilities of Intel compute, storage, networking and software components to accelerate computations.

In addition to on-premise implementations of Arvados, the company is also making the platform available through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering called Curoverse Cloud. The Curoverse Cloud beta is currently free to use and beta accounts provide 1 terabyte of storage and 100 hours of compute time per month for 6 months. According to the company, larger pilots are also available on request.

Go here to read the rest:
Curoverse Announces New Infrastructure Software for Precision Medicine, Genomics and Bioinformatics