McArthur Lab Fights Global Threats to Human Health

The McArthur Lab at McMaster University uses Pure Storage FlashBlade to power genomic surveillance and new drug discovery, advancing global health research and generating insights that save lives.

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Summary

McMaster University’s McArthur Lab oversees a global database that curates data, models, and algorithms associated with superbugs and other threats to human health. Genomics professor and researcher Andrew McArthur, Ph.D., turned to Pure Storage® FlashBlade® as the underlying infrastructure for high performance computing workloads, accelerating genomic threat surveillance, and driving insights that lead to new drug discovery.

Industry

Life Sciences

GEO

North America

Use Cases

Accelerate Core Applications
Activate Real-time Analytics

Website

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Results

Antimicrobial resistance and new coronaviruses are placing modern medicine under siege. A dramatic uptick in sequencing, driven by COVID, put tremendous stress on the McArthur Lab computing infrastructure. Data from massive genomic datasets were doubling every three months. Storage was costly and couldn’t keep up with the demands of gene sequencing technology.

Business Transformation

Analyzes select genomic datasets over 300x faster than previous storage
Powers collective global effort to identify and monitor health threats
Helped isolate live COVID-19 virus, contributing to drug testing and development

IT Transformation

Processes large research datasets twice as fast at one-third of the cost
Handles terabytes of data more efficiently for new DNA sequencing technology, including AI and ML projects
Scales storage capacity easily to support additional research and clinical partnerships

“There’s no point in playing with traditional storage because it’s just not fast enough. With Pure Storage FlashBlade, we can stay ahead of the curve as we fight global threats to human health.”

McMaster University

Andrew G. McArthur, Ph.D.