Storage
Duke Upgrades Storage for Big Data Management
Duke Research Computing at Duke University has expanded its data storage to two petabytes to support the big data
management needs of its researchers.
The university is home to the Duke Lemur
Center, which has the largest population of lemurs in the world outside of
Madagascar, where they originate. Evolutionary biologists at the center require
significant quantities of storage for genomic research to help save this
endangered animal. According to information from the university, "a genome for
one lemur contains about three billion pairs of DNA," representing about 700
megabytes of data. To conduct their research, the biologists require many DNA
sets, resulting in huge volumes of data, and analyzing it generates even more
data.
"For evolutionary biology, the amount of DNA sequence data is growing
exponentially," said Peter Larsen, evolutionary biologist at the Duke
Lemur Center, in a prepared statement. "All of this is a wealth of
information that needs to be stored and protected."
Furthermore, to receive grants from funding organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, researchers must
demonstrate that they have sufficient data management capabilities.
To provide researchers with sufficient data management capacity to do their
work and receive grants, Duke Research Computing, which is part of the
university's Office of Information Technology (OIT), recently added 500 more
terabytes of data storage, bringing the total amount of storage dedicated to
research uses up to two petabytes.
Researchers at the Duke Lemur Center are also taking advantage of the
"compute cluster" at Duke Research Computing. Combining the power of the
computing cluster with the expanded data storage helps the evolutionary
biologists at the Lemur Center "analyze genomic information to help identify
pathogens and to better understand disease in lemurs, the world's most
critically endangered primates," according to information from the
university.
Some of Larsen's lemur research has been featured on the National
Geographic Channel.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.
