In Life Sciences and running or considering running genomics workloads? Do not overlook the power of AWS High Performance Compute (HPC). As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with the Life Sciences Competency, the team at PTP comes across numerous biotech firms where the IT leader or bioinformatician inherited an existing cloud infrastructure. Because AWS can be spun up in minutes with a credit card, most of these environments are not initiated with a plan or an architecture (certainly not with alignment to the AWS Well Architected Framework) in mind. For the majority there was simply a need for cloud storage or an application to deploy and they estimated the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance needed and never looked back. You are not alone and the answer is not overly tenuous, it simply requires the right tools to analyze and the skills to put a plan in motion.
We are seeing a growth in adoption for the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) for our Life Sciences customers due to its value in gaining insights and driving results faster. Organizations running genomics workloads require more compute, higher performance file systems and high throughput networking. Solutions from Life Sciences application partners like Quilt and Dotmatics can be highly leveraged with HPC. However, without proper oversight, compute costs can grow rapidly. In one particular case, the PTP team was brought in to review an existing 18-month old HPC environment with sharply increasing costs. Through analysis with our Cloud Management Platform from CloudCheckr, the team identified that this environment was built to be continuously running, yet their needs were for only 30% of the month.
By leveraging AWS Auto Scaling, the PTP team added configurations that kept a heartbeat HPC cluster, a sliver of the always-on cost, allowing for scaling and expansion when needed. This work resulted in a 70% cost reduction for the overall operations of the HPC for the genomics workloads with zero impact to performance. The next step in this process was to conduct an AWS Well Architected Review (WAR) with the tools platform from PTP partner nOps. This work analyzes the overall AWS environment against the 6 pillars of the AWS Well Architected Framework: Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency, Security, Cost-Optimization, Reliability and recently added Sustainability.
Your teams know the chemistry and the biology and the goals for your research and data analytics. PTP knows the AWS cloud, security, cloud networking and cloud management and has the resources to empower your data science team to drive results faster, at a lower cost.
Aaron Jeskey, Senior Cloud Architect
About PTP’s Life Sciences Practice
Accelerating the pace of data science through automation, enhanced workflow resulting in trusted computational biology, chemistry, data science and machine learning.
PTP architects, implements and optimizes AWS technology solutions that enable life sciences and healthcare organizations to develop faster, lower IT costs, and scale their operations. The AWS platform is trusted by the largest enterprises and the hottest startups alike to power a wide variety of workloads, including web and mobile applications, application development, data processing, warehousing, storage, archive and much more.
We are located in the Boston area, the hub of some of the most innovative companies and research institutions in the world in the life sciences, biotech, biopharma and healthcare spaces. We work with companies from start-up to seed funding, from public to pre-IPO, to help them meet security compliance requirements (HIPAA, GxP, etc.), reduce infrastructure costs, improve operational efficiencies, and ultimately innovate faster. Working alongside their IT teams, or directly with their scientists, we design and deploy flexible infrastructure solutions on AWS.