We have been able to use the FPGA-based F1 instances to greatly speed up the process of whole genome sequencing. As a result, what used to take us 20 hours of compute time can now be achieved in only 3 hours.
Professor Dr. Torsten Haferlach Chief Executive Officer, Munich Leukemia Lab

Munich Leukemia Lab (MLL) is a diagnostics and research institution whose mission is to find a cure for leukemia and lymphoma. MLL uses state-of-the-art molecular and IT-supported methods to shape the future of hematological diagnostics and therapy. Using AWS, MLL reduced the turnaround time to process patient genome data from 20 hours to 3 hours, helping accelerate research and improve diagnosis of leukemia.

MLL’s use of high-throughput Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) led to a large increase in the organization’s compute and storage needs, which exceeded the capacity of MLL’s local infrastructure. To deal with its growing need for scalable compute and storage while maintaining a high standard for data security, MLL turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and deployed Illumina’s BaseSpace solution in the AWS Frankfurt region. MLL uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) FPGA-based F1 instances to accelerate its genomics data processing and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for cost-effective storage of the data. Since 2018, more than 2.4 petabytes of data were created from MLL’s analysis of more than 4,200 patient genomes. MLL is now looking to add parallelization, automation, and machine learning to expedite genomic analysis and improve diagnostic accuracy.