SIB Chooses the WEKA Parallel File System for Bioinformatics

overview

Since installing WEKA, SIB supports a growing number of biomedical research projects.

SIB is an internationally recognized center of expertise in data science, dedicated to biological data. It provides life scientists and clinicians with essential databases and custom-made tools, computational biology expertise, secure services for sensitive data as well as bioinformatics training. A non-profit foundation, the Institute also represents the Swiss bioinformatics community by federating about 800 data scientists in the country and fostering collaborations among them.
As part of its infrastructure activities, SIB develops a nationwide project, called BioMedIT, aiming to implement a secure and cutting-edge IT network to support biomedical research and clinical bioinformatics. One of the three nodes of this network, the Romandie infrastructure at SIB operates a platform that offers biomedical researchers a full service for the processing of sensitive data. In this context, cybersecurity and trust are of utmost importance.

“We were looking for a solution that is easy to manage, delivers high performance, and protects data with encryption in-flight. This solution ensures secure data access coupled with the necessary data analysis performance required by research groups.”

Dr. Heinz Stockinger, Head of Core-IT

Challenge

The challenge for SIB was to find a file system solution that provides the combination of data security with encryption, shared data accessibility for authorized users only, and high performance for applications to accelerate research. The IT team at SIB had prior experience with parallel file systems and hierarchical storage managers. Having evaluated other storage alternatives including BeeGFS and ZFS, the team found that none met the data shareability and encryption in-flight requirements without a negative impact on performance.