Requirements

In this section we discuss the following two use cases we have in mind for our distributed system: first a use case where the “life science” group in your organisation has performed a sequencing experiment, and you want to reliably store this data, the second use case being the bioinformatics group wanting to perform some analysis on this data.

Use Case 1: Store Datasets

Wether you collect the genomes of a large number of organisms, or just performed a new sequencing experiment, the data should be stored safely. The biological lab work is often done by a different group than the group performing the actual analysis on the data. The data coming from such experiment should be stored for later analysis.

This brings the following challenges:

  • The huge amount of data: a human genome with 60x read coverage depth can occupy easily 200 GB in its compressed FASTQ file format.
  • The data needs to be stored persistently and reliably.
  • The data needs to be accessible by other teams
  • Analysis and other actions need to be performed on this dataset, and the results should be stored too.

Use Case 2: perform analyses on the data

When the data is safely stored in the database, an organisation probably wants to analyse this data. Think of building a new phylogenetic tree based on a multiple sequence alignment of a collection of genomes. In the case of next generation sequencing you can think of mapping individual reads to a reference genome or locally align them, assemble a new genome from the individual reads, or check if this newly sequenced genome has any variant genes compared to the reference.

Most of these operations are computational expensive, but as discussed in the previous section, a lot of these operations can be performed in parallel, on smaller chunks of the data. Building a scalable distributed system for these kinds of pipelines could reduce the computational time significantly.

Requirements Prioritisation

For our system, we focus on computing the multiple sequence alignment of a large collection of genomes or protein sequences.

Must Have

  • Built a distributed system that computes the multiple sequence alignment of a large collection of genomes or protein sequences.
  • The data must be stored consistently and reliably.
  • Fault tolerant, when one of the nodes crashes it should not hinder the final results. Able to resist one node down of any kind at the same time.
  • Scalable, must be able to handle large genomes

Should have

  • Let the user define a workflow, which specifies with steps to perform, and which steps depends on which previous steps.
  • Multi-tenancy: let multiple teams perform different actions simultaneously.

Could Have

  • Data-ownership: who can see which datasets