Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


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 [email protected].

Featured

  • CIS Sandbox Tutor Eli Blouin at Bentley University imagines a future technology learning partner that supports curiosity, critical thinking, feedback, and personalized learning.

    Student Voices: Technology as a Future Learning Partner

    A data analytics and marketing major at Bentley University and a distinguished lecturer at the university explore the future of "technology learning partners" — technologies that participate in the learning process by asking questions and giving feedback, not just information search results.

  • Abstract energetic glowing lines with particles

    Meta Steps Up Enterprise AI Ambitions with Muse Spark Launch

    Meta has announced the launch of Muse Spark 1.1, a multimodal reasoning model designed for agentic AI, alongside a new Meta Model API that gives developers access to the model for the first time.

  • Businessman using laptop analyzing data and growth graph chart

    AI Budgets in Education Show No Sign of Decline

    The vast majority of education organizations (98%) expect their AI infrastructure budgets to either increase or hold steady over the next year, according to a recent report from cloud storage provider Wasabi.

  • Dana Brunson facilitates a roundtable discussion with research and higher education IT leaders

    Internet2: Closing the Access Gap for Research Cyberinfrastructure

    Internet2's Research Engagement Team brings CIOs and other campus technology leadership together with research computing and data facilitators, forming a community that enables research cyberinfrastructure at institutions of all types and sizes.