Orfeo is the first Italian data center to extract knowledge about Covid
Orfeo completes the Genomics and Epigenomics platform consisting not only of the data center, but also of a series of innovative facilities dedicated to the analysis of sequences on DNA and RNA and genotyping (microarrays).
"The data center, designed before of the pandemic, was promptly used in the fight against Coronavirus "explains Stefano Cozzini, Director of the Research and Technologies Institute of the Area Science Park.
" It was in fact rapidly expanded with specific GPU calculation cards, and in its storage part so that it can be used to store and subsequently analyze the data coming from the analysis of Sars-Cov-2 samples and its variants collected in Friuli Venezia Giulia ".
Among other projects The first semantic browser to extract knowledge on SARS-CoV-2 born in February 2020 by three students of the degree course in Data Science and Scientific Computing of the University of Trieste, in collaboration with Area Science Park and AILC - Italian Association of Computational Linguistics (AILC).
The innovative search engine, based on the most advanced artificial intelligence models, allows to carry out rapid and precise semantic searches in the myriad of existing publications on the subject.
In 2020, more than 4 thousand studies were published on the SARS-CoV-2 virus and Covid-19 worldwide, in addition to more than 40 thousand articles relating to various coronaviruses and the diseases they cause.
The analysis of genomic data needs platforms equipped with great computing power and high memory capacity.
Inside a standard-sized container, Area Science Park installed an HPC made by beanTech: an absolute novelty for the Friulian company that supplied the datacenter part, the set consisting of server cabinets, the cooling system and uninterruptible power supplies and hardware components, certified by Dell Technologies, also guaranteeing continuous assistance, both remotely and on site, and also taking care of logistics and interconnected issues.
Orfeo now has more than 500 cores and 2 thousand terabytes of usable disk space, declined in different types of technologies. From the moment of entry into service of the data center, the rates of use were higher than the standard ones so as to reach 90% of the total capacity of the period with over 2 million calculations from July to December 2020.
Orfeo is part of the Argo strategic initiative, an industrial system based on the innovation of processes and products that works to increase economic productivity and generate new jobs, through the interaction between research and industry on a national scale.
The Argo System was born from a memorandum of understanding, signed in March 2018, between the Ministry of University and Research, the Ministry of Economic Development and the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, which identified in the Area Science Park the coordinator of all complex activities: successfully tested in Friuli Venezia Giulia, today it is expanding on a national scale and has already seen the interest of the Campania Region.
The Argo system counts circ to 50 partners, public entities and private companies, which develop complex projects in synergy.
