Services: Assessment

A large percentage of BioTeam professional services fall under the category of “technical audit” or “needs assessment” projects.

In these engagements, BioTeam consultants are able to leverage their broad skill sets and experience to identify and document technical requirements as well as provide honest and un-biased recommendations to our clients. Our ability to act as an impartial 3rd party that understands both science and high performance computing (‘HPC’) allows us to research, document and deliver objective reports while minimizing or removing any organizational or political difficulties sometimes encountered during inhouse efforts.

These services are often highly customized for each customer but there are some broad themes to the type of assessment work BioTeam has been doing recently:

• IT Customers: Our research backgrounds allow us to quickly enter scientific environments and document workflows (current & future), data types, data movement and instrument duty cycles. We can then translate research & business requirements into IT terms (storage, compute, network, etc.) and present them to IT organizations. Our reports have been used to influence HPC architectures, storage planning, vendor selection, RFP documents and Capital Expenditure justifications.
• Research Customers: Terabyte-scale instruments are proliferating in labs large and small. For researchers or labs without strong research-savvy IT support, BioTeam is able to step in as a “subject matter expert”. Services rage from application & instrument integration to helping the researchers select & purchase the appropriate infrastructure elements. As advocates for the end-user we have been quite successful in helping researchers avoid being taken advantage of by unscrupulous VARS, resellers and vendors who may be (intentionally or through lack of research experience) pitching wildly inappropriate products and services.
• Storage: Chemistry and lab protocols change far faster than organizations can refresh datacenters and core infrastructure. A significant percentage of our assessment work involves storage-centric consulting, evaluation, forecasting and design services. Many of our clients are planning for petabyte-scale information storage platforms
• Research IT Transition Services: Large global organizations often develop “pockets” of informatics and HPC infrastructures developed organically by research organizations and situated far outside of mainstream Enterprise Operations, Management and Support organizations. When these systems and services become too difficult to maintain, upgrade and support, BioTeam has significant expertise in assisting with migrating, recreating and relocating critical HPC and informatics services into formal enterprise IT environments. We have successfully migrated complete research informatics systems for a number of global organizations. During these projects we are often “attached” to Global IT Storage and Operation teams as domain-experts representing the research users and R&D organization.
• Cloud: We can assess ongoing scientific efforts and identify the ones most suitable for migration into “the cloud” in “production” or “pilot” form.

Some examples from recent work include:

Evaluating prototype products for suitability in the life science market
A multi-national corporation had internally developed an exotic and potentially novel computing appliance. The company was still evaluating early prototypes and trying to understand the size and requirements of potential markets. BioTeam was hired to evaluate the device from a life-science viewpoint and was given access to extensive technical documentation and one of the few existing engineering prototypes. Our analysis and detailed report (including very blunt observations and conclusions) was later used to justify an internal “continue development” vs. “halt development” management decision.

Research Infrastructure Optimization & Assessment
A well-known University was operating a Linux cluster as a multidisciplinary computing resource for many campus labs and departments. The cluster had an enthusiastic userbase and was operating at 99% load almost continuously. After users began complaining of long delays and wait times in returning job results, BioTeam was hired to assess the cluster and the configuration of the Platform LSF ‘DRM’ software layer. After spending a day onsite interviewing cluster operators and analyzing 2.5 years worth of system accounting logs, BioTeam was able to return on the 2nd day and propose simple LSF policy configuration changes to improve the end-user experience without requiring an expensive expansion of the cluster itself.

Scientific Computing Needs Assessment
The IS organization of a multi-billion dollar corporation planning construction of a 500,000 square foot collaborative research facility hired the BioTeam to document the computing requirements of all current and planned scientific research efforts. During the project, BioTeam staff spent two months interviewing more than 40 scientists, managers and IT professionals at all levels within the company. The final report documented the research being done across all departments and summarized each in terms of compute, storage, network, archive and backup requirements. The technical computing requirements documented by the BioTeam were used to design the high performance computing (‘HPC’) core facility and the storage, compute and network resources deployed within.

Facility Consulting A well-known medical school was days away from finalizing the architectural plans for a new highrise research building when it was discovered that datacenter size, layout and floorplans had never been shared or discussed with the researcher community. BioTeam was able to provide critical feedback that resulted in significant alterations to the plan before such changes would have resulted in expensive and time-consuming construction change orders.

Startup Assistance BioTeam is able to assist “stealth mode” startup companies emerging from VC incubator status. Our assessment and design services have been used to estimate the cost of launching the company and justifying additional rounds of funding for capital and operational expenditures. A heavily-redacted version of one of these reports is available upon request.