Biomedical super computer enhance SSF-project
A novel, faster, more reliable, and less expensive method for the evaluation of clinically useful biomarkers, through exploitation of the Swedish register and biobank infrastructure. That is professor Dillners project funded by SSF. With this approach he and his group hopes to establish whether any new biomarker, or combinations of such, are superior to the currently best practice in cervical screening. In order to do this huge amounts of biodata are needed and processed.
As the amount of biomedical research data generated is increasing exponentially, managing and storing the research data is becoming a bottleneck in biomedical research. Following an EU-wide purchasing procedure, Karolinska Institutet has purchased one of the largest computing clusters in Sweden dedicated to research on big biomedical data (2 Petabytes of storage capacity, 24 computer nodes, 674 CPU cores and 6 terabytes of operating memory). As the Center is based on the Open Source Apache Hadoop and Spark frameworks, it is a scalable solution that can be cost-effectively adapted to changing demands in the biomedical field.
-“Systematic “omics” analyses are part of our excellence project in biomarker research, funded by SSF. The project is systematically investigating the usefulness of high-throughput “omics” analyses to identify biomarkers useful for cervical cancer screening. This investment will greatly improve our ability to manage and store the immense amounts of data generated”, says Joakim Dillner, professor of infectious disease epidemiology and principal investigator of the SSF grant for the project “Biobank-based Evaluation of New Cervical Screening Tests”.
The project also coordinates a Nordic Center of Excellence in health-related eSciences http://www.nordicehealth.se/ funded by NordForsk. The Biomedical Computing Center will enable additional Nordic collaborations in eHealth and research on Big biomedical data.