OCF secures healthy sum with NIHR deal

VAR helps biomedical researchers at two London hospitals speed up their data flow

IT is in the DNA: OCF's installation will cut analysis time 20-fold

High-performance computing (HPC) VAR OCF has finished a supercomputer installation at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

The deal, worth more than £300,000, will help medical researchers at the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London to analyse, store and archive critical genetic data.

Sequencing machines used in the research generate up to 50 billion pairs of usable DNA sequence data every 10 days. OCF’s HPC system, based on IBM iDataplex technology, will cut the analysis time down 20-fold, from days to hours, said Julian Fielden, managing director of OCF.

“We had to go through a tendering process and got the order in January,” he added. “The market for HPC services is very competitive with a lot of these machines around generating vast volumes of data.

“We hope more organisations will start to think about how this IT should be configured for optimum use.”