The COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium has been awarded Best High-Performance Computing (HPC) Collaboration at the HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards 2020, in recognition of its work to process COVID-19 genomic sequence data and make it available to researchers. The awards recognise the most outstanding individuals, organisations, products, and technologies in the world of high-performance computing.
COG-UK was created in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim of sequencing and analysing viral genomes to fully understand the transmission and evolution of the virus. The urgency of the situation requires large volumes of genetic sequence data to be generated rapidly. The sequencing is performed in collaboration across the COG-UK consortium, including at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where it is initially processed by the Institute’s private cloud computing, before being passed on to the Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Informatics (CLIMB) platform where it is combined.
The genetic sequence data are made available to researchers across the UK and beyond via the CLIMB platform, a collaboration between Warwick, Birmingham, Cardiff, Swansea, Bath and Leicester Universities, the MRC Unit the Gambia at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Quadram Institute. These data are enabling earlier investigations of outbreaks, and better understanding of how genetic mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome change the ability of the virus to transmit from person to person.
Dr Tim Cutts, Head of Scientific Computing at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: “At the beginning of the pandemic, we were asked to repurpose our cloud infrastructure to handle the large volumes of COVID-19 sequence data that would be coming in. Thanks to the skill and dedication of the team and the high-performance storage solutions provided by DDN, we were able to do this in record time. I’m extremely proud of the contribution that COG-UK has made to the world’s understanding of COVID-19.”
Dr Jeff Barrett, Lead COVID-19 Statistical Geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, added: “The Sanger Institute and its COG-UK partners have sequenced more COVID-19 genomes than anywhere else in the world, which is an incredible achievement. But this would mean nothing without making these data widely available, which has been made possible by our high-performance computing team.”