Hitachi Vantara (Hitachi) Case Studies Accelerating Medical Research and Testing with IoT: A Case Study of Karolinska Institutet

	Accelerating Medical Research and Testing with IoT: A Case Study of Karolinska Institutet Hitachi Vantara (Hitachi)

Accelerating Medical Research and Testing with IoT: A Case Study of Karolinska Institutet

Hitachi Vantara (Hitachi)

Technology Category	Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries	Life Sciences Pharmaceuticals
Applicable Functions	Product Research & Development Quality Assurance
Use Cases	Construction Management Infrastructure Inspection
Services	System Integration Testing & Certification
Challenge	Karolinska Institutet, a leading medical university, was tasked with accelerating research into chronic diseases and the impact of the human microbiome on reproductive health. This research was compute- and memory-intensive, requiring flexible compute capacity to process large batches of samples that arrive unpredictably. In 2020, the Centre for Translational Microbiome Research (CTMR) at the university was also tasked by the Swedish government to set up a new National Pandemic Centre (NPC) to strengthen Sweden’s COVID-19 response. The NPC was responsible for analyzing approximately 45,000 PCR-based COVID-19 tests per week, making it one of the largest lab facilities in Sweden for SARS-CoV-2 analyses. However, the CTMR was running IT services and analytics jobs on two physical servers, in a static configuration with no virtualization or capacity to scale, which posed a significant challenge. Read More
About Customer	Karolinska Institutet is one of the world’s leading medical universities, contributing to the improvement of human health and generating more than 6,000 peer-reviewed scientific publications per year. The university has a unique position in academia, as the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet is responsible for selecting Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine. The Centre for Translational Microbiome Research (CTMR) at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology is an innovative public-private partnership with Ferring Pharmaceuticals, a research-driven, specialty biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Switzerland and with roots in Sweden. Read More
Solution	To address the challenge, Hitachi Vantara approached the CTMR to support COVID-19 research and testing. They designed a converged infrastructure solution for the CTMR, deploying a Hitachi Unified Compute Platform CI solution in combination with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F370 arrays. The solution integrated compute, storage, network and management software, and provided a high level of flexibility by using VMware virtualization to adjust resources dynamically. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor software simplified systems management and automated administration tasks. The team could also deploy and use standard HPC tools such as Slurm for cluster management and job scheduling across the virtualized server infrastructure. Hitachi Vantara worked with its partners Cisco and VMware to offer a comprehensive loan to the CTMR to speed up the implementation. The solution met the strict rules and requirements of the university’s central IT, and was installed at one of the university’s main data center facilities. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Life Sciences

Pharmaceuticals

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development

Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Construction Management

Infrastructure Inspection

Services

System Integration

Testing & Certification

Challenge

Karolinska Institutet, a leading medical university, was tasked with accelerating research into chronic diseases and the impact of the human microbiome on reproductive health. This research was compute- and memory-intensive, requiring flexible compute capacity to process large batches of samples that arrive unpredictably. In 2020, the Centre for Translational Microbiome Research (CTMR) at the university was also tasked by the Swedish government to set up a new National Pandemic Centre (NPC) to strengthen Sweden’s COVID-19 response. The NPC was responsible for analyzing approximately 45,000 PCR-based COVID-19 tests per week, making it one of the largest lab facilities in Sweden for SARS-CoV-2 analyses. However, the CTMR was running IT services and analytics jobs on two physical servers, in a static configuration with no virtualization or capacity to scale, which posed a significant challenge.

About Customer

Karolinska Institutet is one of the world’s leading medical universities, contributing to the improvement of human health and generating more than 6,000 peer-reviewed scientific publications per year. The university has a unique position in academia, as the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet is responsible for selecting Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine. The Centre for Translational Microbiome Research (CTMR) at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology is an innovative public-private partnership with Ferring Pharmaceuticals, a research-driven, specialty biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Switzerland and with roots in Sweden.

Solution

To address the challenge, Hitachi Vantara approached the CTMR to support COVID-19 research and testing. They designed a converged infrastructure solution for the CTMR, deploying a Hitachi Unified Compute Platform CI solution in combination with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F370 arrays. The solution integrated compute, storage, network and management software, and provided a high level of flexibility by using VMware virtualization to adjust resources dynamically. Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor software simplified systems management and automated administration tasks. The team could also deploy and use standard HPC tools such as Slurm for cluster management and job scheduling across the virtualized server infrastructure. Hitachi Vantara worked with its partners Cisco and VMware to offer a comprehensive loan to the CTMR to speed up the implementation. The solution met the strict rules and requirements of the university’s central IT, and was installed at one of the university’s main data center facilities.

Impact #1	Thanks to Hitachi Vantara, the CTMR has established an agile and modular in-house high-performance computing platform. By managing its resources with VMware virtualization and Hitachi UCP Advisor, the CTMR has been able to streamline system administration, and automate deployment and system management tasks. The team can quickly and easily reconfigure its cluster by spinning up and shutting down virtual machines for specific computing tasks as needed. This has significantly improved the efficiency and flexibility of their operations, enabling them to respond more effectively to the demands of their research and testing work.

Impact #1

Thanks to Hitachi Vantara, the CTMR has established an agile and modular in-house high-performance computing platform. By managing its resources with VMware virtualization and Hitachi UCP Advisor, the CTMR has been able to streamline system administration, and automate deployment and system management tasks. The team can quickly and easily reconfigure its cluster by spinning up and shutting down virtual machines for specific computing tasks as needed. This has significantly improved the efficiency and flexibility of their operations, enabling them to respond more effectively to the demands of their research and testing work.

Benefit #1	Scales up analytics performance to process large amounts of DNA sequencing data per week
Benefit #2	Speeds up medical research (including COVID-19) by delivering instant insight and eliminating delays
Benefit #3	Transforms static infrastructure into a dynamic, highly automated cluster solution

Benefit #1

Scales up analytics performance to process large amounts of DNA sequencing data per week

Benefit #2

Speeds up medical research (including COVID-19) by delivering instant insight and eliminating delays

Benefit #3

Transforms static infrastructure into a dynamic, highly automated cluster solution

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Overview

Accelerating Medical Research and Testing with IoT: A Case Study of Karolinska Institutet

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit