NextBio and Intel announced today a collaboration aimed at optimizing and stabilizing the Hadoop stack and advancing the use of Big Data technologies in genomics. As a part of this collaboration, the NextBio and Intel engineering teams will apply experience they have gained from NextBio’s use of Big Data technologies to the improvement of HDFS, Hadoop, and HBase. Any enhancements that NextBio engineers make to the Hadoop stack will be contributed to the open-source community. Intel will also showcase NextBio’s use of Big Data.

“NextBio is positioned at the intersection of Genomics and Big Data. Every day we deal with the three V’s (volume, variety, and velocity) associated with Big Data – We, our collaborators, and our users are adding large volumes of a variety of molecular data to NextBio at an increasing velocity,” said Dr. Satnam Alag, chief technology officer and vice president of engineering at NextBio. “Without the implementation of our algorithms in the MapReduce framework, operational expertise in HDFS, Hadoop, and HBase, and investments in building our secure cloud-based infrastructure, it would have been impossible for us to scale cost-effectively to handle this large-scale data.”

“Intel is firmly committed to the wide adoption and use of Big Data technologies such as HDFS, Hadoop, and HBase across all industries that need to analyze large amounts of data,” said Girish Juneja, CTO and General Manager, Big Data Software and Services, Intel. “Complex data requiring compute-intensive analysis needs not only Big Data open source, but a combination of hardware and software management optimizations to help deliver needed scale with a high return on investment. Intel is working closely with NextBio to deliver this showcase reference to the Big Data community and life science industry.”

“The use of Big Data technologies at NextBio enables researchers and clinicians to mine billions of data points in real-time to discover new biomarkers, clinically assess targets and drug profiles, optimally design clinical trials, and interpret patient molecular data,” Dr. Alag continued. “NextBio has invested significantly in the use of Big Data technologies to handle the tsunami of genomic data being generated and its expected exponential growth. As we further scale our infrastructure to handle this growing data resource, we are excited to work with Intel to make the Hadoop stack better and give back to the open-source community.”