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Accelerating Medical Research and Testing with IoT: A Case Study of Karolinska Institutet
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
The 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 The 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.
The 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.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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