Carlos Simon Foundation Performs Health Research 50% Faster with Bahia Software on AWS

Carlos Simon Foundation (FCS in Spanish), a non-profit organization dedicated to research in women’s health, saved approximately €350,000, and increased performance by up to 70 percent by migrating from on premises to Amazon Web Services (AWS). FCS faced a rapid technology change when its parent research institution was acquired by a foreign company. Located in Valencia, Spain, FCS needed a secure solution that could easily scale and provide high levels of performance for processing and analyzing research data. It chose Bahía Software, an AWS Partner, to migrate from an on-premises data center to a high-performance computing environment using AWS ParallelCluster and Amazon EC2.

Carlos Simon Foundation conducts research into women’s reproductive health, with a focus on the uterus. Its research is used to expand understanding of the female reproductive system and apply those findings to improve women’s lives. It specializes in computational biology—which uses experimental data, mathematical models, and computational simulations—to gain insights that can benefit the health of women. One of the foundation’s key tools is RNA sequencing which focuses on gene function in cells. This produces a lot of data, which consumes significant IT resources to manage, analyze, and store. When its former parent organization, Igenomix Foundation, was acquired by a foreign company, FCS needed to find a new infrastructure to support its research.

FCS looked for a solution that provided considerable compute power and storage space while also fitting into the budget of the newly independent organization. It estimated that an on-premises solution would cost €350,000 to build from scratch, with additional costs for scaling compute resources and ongoing maintenance. “Computational biology is intensive work,” says Beatriz Rosón Burgo, bioinformatics principal scientist at Carlos Simon Foundation. “Our information technology must provide fast and accurate processing of our data. Even before we separated from Igenomix, we were bumping up against the limits of our on-premises systems.”

The organization had to move from its Igenomix data center by December 31, 2022—about a year after the sale was finalized. It turned to AWS Partner Bahía Software, a company it had worked with previously. Working together, FCS and Bahía started with a pilot project on AWS, and—after that proved successful—built a fully cloud-native solution. FCS was excited about the flexibility that moving to AWS provided. “On premises means that you are often over-provisioned or under-provisioned,” says Rosón Burgo. “And, as we were starting from scratch, there is a large capital expense in building on premises. Bahía recommended using AWS to address these issues.”

Bahía knew from experience working in the health sector that FCS needed a solution that was reliable, scalable, economical, and secure. FCS also needed a solution quickly, so it would experience no disruption in conducting research. “One of the advantages of using AWS is being able to get up and running very quickly,” says Román López, project director at Bahía Software. “We created a pilot on a critical component of the solution that was fully functional in 3 months. Building the same thing on premises could easily have taken two or three times as long. And then, 6 months later, we had completed the full migration.”

FCS and Bahía built a high-performance computing (HPC) environment that can handle demanding workloads. It uses AWS ParallelCluster, an open-source cluster management tool that makes it easy to deploy and manage HPC clusters on AWS. It also uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides on-demand compute resources to run HPC applications fast and cost-effectively. Using the new solution, FCS sees improved performance, compared to its previous on-premises solution. For example, it can now process and sequence samples 50 percent faster than before on average, and some projects are up to 70 percent faster.

For storing research data and results, FCS uses Amazon RDS for MariaDB, which allows users to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It also uses other storage options, including Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)—which provides serverless, fully elastic file storage—and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Using these services, FCS can cost-effectively store and manage the large amounts of data that its research produces.

Cortesy: Carlos Simon Foundation

The team of computational biologists at FCS comprises of both scientists with training in IT systems and IT specialists with additional training in biological research. Bahía has been able to work so effectively with FCS because it has a similar blend of skills in health research and technology. “We are not just tech specialists,” says López. “We have bioinformatics specialists on our team with PhDs and years of experience. They really understand the special needs of a research foundation like FCS.”

Using AWS, FCS researchers can now easily collaborate with other institutions around the world. They have created a secure, shared environment on AWS that colleagues and researchers at the foundation can access remotely, to check on their projects in near-real time. This is all done without compromising the privacy of the personal health data of research subjects.

Working with Bahía and using AWS, FCS can focus on improving lives by quickly and effectively conducting research and analyzing results. “We are experiencing at least 50 percent faster processing of our data than using the on-premises system,” says Rosón Burgo. “We have saved time and money that we would have put into building an on-premises data center that wouldn’t have performed as well. Instead, we can use technology to advance our research and hopefully improve more lives.”