Genomics England is the world’s largest community in genomic healthcare and medical research. Owned by the UK Department of Health and Social Services, it is at the heart of the UK Government’s vision to “create the most advanced genomic healthcare ecosystem in the world.”

Genomics England analyses vast amounts of sensitive clinical and other genomics data using High Performance Computing (HPC) technology, where thousands compute nodes work in parallel to process quadrillions of calculations per second.

Driven by a need to generate larger and more varied datasets which were query-able by its research partners, Genomics England decided to migrate their data and bioinformatics systems from their existing cloud provider to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

AWS met the criteria for a highly scalable, flexible and secure platform that enabled effective cost management of HPC resources.

Genomics England turned to The Server Labs for help. They knew and trusted them, based on The Server Labs having successfully provided engineering, solutions architecture and technology support for an HPC project the year before.

They knew that as an AWS partner, The Server Labs has the required expertise to deliver the project’s demands.

The Server Labs’ team of 20 consultants, led by CTO Paul Parsons, selected Cloud Endure as the tool to migrate the applications and created a repetitive, high-quality, high velocity ‘factory’ process. For the re-architecting work, they used Cloud Native services.

Other work included updates to new versions of key services such as database instances, licencing optimisations, and security enhancements using automation to provide real time monitoring and reporting of security vulnerabilities across hundreds of AWS accounts.