by Angela Guess

A recent press release reports, “The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard today announced a $25 million collaboration with Intel Corporation to scale researchers’ ability to analyze massive amounts of genomic data from diverse sources worldwide. Through a five-year collaboration, researchers and software engineers at the new Intel-Broad Center for Genomic Data Engineering will build, optimize, and widely share new tools and infrastructure that will help scientists integrate and process genomic data. The project aims to optimize best practices in hardware and software for genome analytics to make it possible to combine and use research data sets that reside on private, public, and hybrid clouds. The project will enable researchers worldwide to run more data-intensive studies and generate robust results more quickly by accessing data that may have been unavailable to them before.”

Eric Banks, director of the Data Sciences and Data Engineering group at the Broad Institute, commented, “The size of genomic datasets doubles about every eight months and, as it does, the challenge of acquiring, processing, storing, and analyzing this information increases as well… Working with Intel, we plan to build out solutions that can work across different infrastructures to facilitate efficient processing of these growing data sets, and then make these tools openly available for researchers worldwide. Our work is a step toward building something analogous to a superhighway to connect disparate databases of genomic information for the advancement of research and precision medicine.”

Read more at PR Newswire.

Photo credit: Broad Institute