AWS Case Study: Harvard Medical School

The Laboratory for Personalized Medicine (LPM), of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, run by Dr. Peter Tonellato, took the power of Oracle and the flexibility of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop innovative genetic testing models in record time. “The combination of Oracle and AWS allowed us to focus our time and energy on simulation development, rather than technology, to get results quickly,” said Tonellato. “Without the benefits of AWS, we certainly would not be as far along as we are.”

Tonellato’s lab focuses on personalized medicine—preventive healthcare for individuals based on their genetic characteristics—by creating models and simulations to assess the clinical value of new genetic tests. To overcome the difficulty of finding enough real patient data for modeling, LPM creates patient avatars—literally “virtual” patients. The lab can create different sets of avatars for different genetic tests and then replicate huge numbers of them based on the characteristics of hospital populations.

Tonellato needed to find an efficient way to manipulate many avatars, sometimes as many as 100 million at a time. “In addition to being able to handle enormous amounts of data,” he said, “I wanted to devise system where postdoctoral researchers can scope a genetic risk situation, determine the appropriate simulation and analysis to create the avatars, and then quickly build web applications to run the simulations, rather than spend their time troubleshooting computing technology.”

Cloud computing proved to be the answer to Tonellato’s dilemma. “I evaluated several alternatives but found nothing as flexible and robust as Amazon Web Services,” he said. Having built datacenters previously, Tonellato could not afford the time he knew would be required to set up servers and then write code. Instead, he decided to conduct a test to see how fast his team could put together a series of custom Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that would reflect the optimal development environment for researchers’ web applications. With many years’ experience working with Oracle, he asked the company for help. On June 6th, Oracle sent Tonellato their private Linux AMIs to use with his data modeling and by June 16th, Tonellato’s team finished customizing the Oracle Linux AMIs. Two weeks after that, the team had their first web application up and running. Tonellato’s “test” was an enormous success—the combination of Oracle and AWS allowed him to create a system his researchers could use without getting bogged down with IT concerns.

“The AWS solution is stable, robust, flexible, and low cost,” Tonellato commented. “It has everything to recommend it.”

Tonellato runs his simulations on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides customers with scalable compute capacity in the cloud. Designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers, EC2 makes it possible to create and provision, literally within minutes, virtual machines that reside in Amazon’s datacenter.

Oracle has announced new licensing for cloud computing so that Oracle customers can now use AWS—and Amazon EC2—as a deployment platform, just as Tonellato’s lab did. Any customer with an Oracle enterprise license can now launch or deploy as many instances of Oracle products as they want on AWS, without having to pay Oracle additional license fees—putting AWS on a par with all other platform choices open to Oracle customers. Oracle has also released a number of offerings specific to AWS, including AMIs for Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Enterprise Linux offerings, such as those Tonellato’s lab customized to create their web applications.

Tonellato’s lab is thrilled with their AWS solution. “The number of genetic tests available to doctors and hospitals is constantly increasing,” Tonellato explained, “and they can be very expensive. We’re interested in determining which tests will result in better patient care and better results.” He added, “We believe our models may dramatically reduce the time it usually takes to identify the tests, protocols, and trials that are worthpursuing aggressively for both FDA approval and clinical use.”

For more information on Oracle and AWS, visit the AWS Oracle page.

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