Pharmaceutical Business review

Illumina Launches Integrated Computing For Genome Analyzer Sequencing Platform

Illumina has launched IlluminaCompute, a fully-integrated computing solution for its Genome Analyzer sequencing platform. The new product conserves IT resources by providing centralized high-performance computational and storage infrastructure, compared to the support required for individual, decentralized analysis servers.

IlluminaCompute is a combination of hardware, informatics software and high-availability storage that is delivered and supported directly by Illumina’s customer solutions team. The system is tuned specifically for a high-throughput sequence analysis workflow.

The company said that the server and risk management overhead is kept to an absolute minimum, reducing the need for dedicated IT and bioinformatics staff. The product provides sufficient processing resources for computational-heavy analysis that requires clustered processing and shared data repositories, such as genome assembly, deep sequencing and metagenomics research.

Scott Kahn, vice president and chief information officer at Illumina, said: “Illumina and our IT partners collaborated to address an unmet need for highly scalable computing capabilities that can keep pace with the remarkable growth in the throughput of the Genome Analyzer. No other genomics provider currently offers a turn-key solution like IlluminaCompute that can be customized and extended for small and growing sequencing facilities and also scaled to meet the needs of larger genome centers.”

Illumina is a developer, manufacturer and marketer of life-science tools and integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function. It provides a line of products and services that currently serve the sequencing, genotyping, and gene expression markets, and also expect to enter the market for molecular diagnostics.