About our Bioinformatics Platform and the Technologies used

The genosmartDX Bioinformatics Platform is a state-of-the-art solution, specialized to solve complex genetic diagnosis tasks. The system architecture was built up using the approach of an industry-leading organization, the Broad Institute as a benchmark.

In the background, a highly scalable Cloud Native infrastructure, the Enterprise Cloud Platform is running to ensure that we have the necessary computational power available at the right time to perform molecular analysis of DNA and RNA sequences at top speed. This infrastructure can dynamically build up a series of virtual machines that run fully containerized services in a microservice architecture. After the analysis, all the results are persisted. The whole process is fully automatic and highly scalable, according to the actual needs.

Genetic analysis processes are defined using standard Workflow Definition Language (WDL), whereby the workflows, the tasks, the bio tools used and low-level instructions (CLI) are all part of the WDL definition. Based on this approach, we enable doctors / scientists to run multiple alternative analysis parameter sets in parallel processes, running all these within the same time as a single process. After any interruption in the execution of the analysis, the system can recover and continue the process from the given state. It is also possible to repeat an analysis that had been performed long time ago and deliver a consistent result thanks to the ability to set up and run the same software environment as the one used originally.

Primary technologies and tools used include Kubernetes cluster, Rachner cluster management, Docker containerization with HELM and HARBOR, Java Spring Boot, and REST API.

Our system deployment is performed with a DevOps mindset: fast delivery is provided with a fully automated infrastructure, i.e., manual intervention is minimized and data is secured using redundancy, backups, and hot-cold storages.