April 24, 2012, Cambridge, Mass. and Shenzhen, China – BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, introduced today its latest-generation cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, EasyGenomics, at the 10th Bio-IT World Conference & Expo being held April 24 to 26 in Boston, Mass. EasyGenomics allows scientists to easily access data-heavy omics-related research with rapid turnaround time, reliable results, real-time data monitoring, and a user-friendly interface. EasyGenomics integrates various popular next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis workflows including whole genome resequencing, exome resequencing, RNA-Seq, small RNA, de novo assembly, among others. EasyGenomics can be accessed via www.easygenomics.com.
"BGI developed EasyGenomics to provide researchers a highly effective and intuitive next-gen bioinformatics solution incorporating the power of cloud computing with state-of-the-art high-speed file transferring technology," said Dr. Lin Fang, Vice President of BGI. "EasyGenomics will facilitate the processing of large volumes of genomic data, and make omics-related research faster and easier for our customers and collaborators."
EasyGenomics, incorporating BGI's well-recognized NGS bioinformatics and analysis capabilities, offers fully integrated data analysis workflows consisting of carefully chosen, tested and optimized algorithms. It is also built with large back-end databases for storing vast datasets and a robust resource management engine that allows precise distribution of computational tasks, real-time task monitoring and prompt response to errors. Featuring an intuitive "point and click" user interface and convenient data management system, EasyGenomics provides a simple and convenient user experience that makes bioinformatics analysis more easily accessible.
EasyGenomics greatly improves the speed of genomic data delivery by integrating Aspera's patented fasp™ high-speed file transferring technology and Connect Server. Data transmission speeds are expected to be 10 to 100 times faster than traditional methods used today, such as FTP.
EasyGenomics also integrates a de novo assembly workflow based on Apache™ Hadoop™ MapReduce distributed computing framework. With this framework, EasyGenomics enables broad scalability and efficient distribution of computational tasks, and achieves comparable results to the best-in-class SOAPdenovo without high-memory constraints.
"BGI's EasyGenomics provides an efficient and reliable bioinformatics solution to meet the growing need for managing and analyzing Big Genomics Data," added Dr. Fang. "With this platform, we can support our customers and partners to make additional breakthroughs in genomics research for the benefit of life sciences."
Genomics and NGS technologies have revolutionized the life sciences. While the cost of DNA sequencing is steadily decreasing, the amount of data generated with NGS technologies is growing at an unprecedented pace. In the age of "Big Genomics Data", handling, storing and sharing the tremendous volume of data has become a significant research bottleneck. The cloud-based EasyGenomics offers a viable solution for large-scale bioinformatics analysis, both in terms of resource utilization, flexibility and efficiency, as well as time and cost savings for massive data generation and computation.
Source: BGI Shenzhen