Converged IT Summit: Exploring Compute Architecture for Life Sciences

July 23, 2015

By Allison Proffitt 

July 23, 2015 | If you missed the lightening round that is Chris Dagdigian’s annual Trends from the Trenches talk at Bio-IT World this year, you’ll have another opportunity to catch up at BioTeam’s first Converged IT Summit in San Francisco this September 9-10* (the event is co-organized by Cambridge Healthtech Institute, Bio-IT World's parent company). I’m sure Dags will have plenty new to say in his keynote presentation, and he’s not the only one. The Summit agenda features two solid days of leaders who are deploying scientific computing infrastructure for life sciences and healthcare.

At Bio-IT World in April I caught up with BioTeam’s CEO and founding partner, Stan Gloss. He gave me an overview of the event and highlighted some of the speakers he is most excited about.

While I limited him to only five, that was a bit unfair. There’s not a bad slot on the agenda. Here are a few more we are particularly looking forward to hearing. We hope to see you in San Francisco!

When news broke in mid-June that Matthew Trunnell would be leaving the Broad Institute at the end of August to be the Chief Information Officer at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, our first email was to confirm he’d still keep his keynote spot at the Summit. He is, and we are very much looking forward to his take on building an engineering infrastructure to support global-scale genomics.

Eric Dishman’s perspective is unique. The general manager for health and life sciences at Intel, Dishman credits whole genome analysis with saving his life. At the Summit he will explore what kinds of analytics and data visualization technologies can help clinicians make meaningful use of ‘omics data.

The science DMZ has become quite a buzzword lately and we are looking forward to an afternoon of talks on next-generation infrastructure including two specifically on the science DMZ from Eli Dart (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and JJ Jamison (Juniper Networks).

We’ve flagged three talks on creating a hybrid cloud architecture: Aaron Black (Inova Translational Medicine Institute), Paul Gibson (CIO of the USDA Agricultural Research Service), and Mike Russo (Biogen) will all share their best practices for building the right architecture to work with large-scale,  data-intensive research.

Wednesday afternoon’s clinical session will be a sure bet. This will be our first time to hear Rob Ring, CSO of Autism Speaks. Autism Speaks is using Google Cloud to host the MSSNG project, which takes whole genome sequence data from 10,000 individuals and is building an environment where this data can be made as useful and widely accessible as possible.  

Also presenting clinical applications, John Quackenbush (Dana-Farber, Genospace) will focus on the practicalities of implementing precision medicine. He’ll give his guiding principles for setting up a system able to handle genomic medicine.

Is there a Goldilocks solution for academic research computing? Ruth Marinshaw, CTO at Stanford University, compares the too big, multi-institutional cyberinfrastructures and the too-small solutions built for single projects in search of an infrastructure to enable data-intensive research computing that’s just right. 

* The Converged IT Summit is co-organized by Cambridge Healthtech Institute. September 9-10, 2015, InterContinental Hotel, San Francisco, Calif.