At AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas, Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) subsidiary AWS launched Amazon Omics to help researchers sift through genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic data.
The volume of such data is exploding. The National Human Genome Research Institute estimates that researchers will need approximately 40 exabytes to store genome-sequence data generated internationally by 2025. One exabyte equates to one billion gigabytes. A single human genome alone has around three billion base pairs of DNA.
The Amazon Omics platform is now available in North Virginia, Oregon, Ireland, London, Frankfurt and Singapore.
Amazon’s rival Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has similar offerings known as Microsoft Genomics and Microsoft Immunomics on its Azure cloud.
AWS notes that with Amazon Omics, it is possible to import and standardize petabytes of data to facilitate analytics with a few clicks of the Amazon Omics console.
A screen shot of Amazon Omics. [Image courtesy of Amazon]
Amazon Omics offers omics-optimized object storage, managed compute for bioinformatics workflows and optimized data stores for population-scale variant analysis.
The system enables end users to store, query and analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data. The platform supports the storage of petabytes of genomics data. It can be used with FASTQ, BAM and CRAM file formats.
In addition, the platform allows users to create and execute bioinformatics workflows while defining parameters and references to tools.
The analytics configuration can be used to store variant and annotation data. In addition, it can integrate with Amazon Athena, AWS LakeFormation and Amazon SageMaker.
AWS also announced its beta/launch customers, which include the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, G42 Healthcare, Ovation, Element Biosciences, Ultima Genomics, BioTeam and Diamond Age Data Science.
At the event in Las Vegas, Amazon also announced the launch of AWS Supply Chain and a chip that gives the company high-performance computing capabilities.
Today, Amazon shares fell 1.63% to $92.42. About a year ago, its shares were trading at around $175.