Novatech and the University of Edinburgh working together
585,000 people have been diagnosed with dementia in the UK in 2015 and those numbers are set to rise. It's more important than ever to understand what influences premature brain ageing and disability. Genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors all play a part in brain ageing.
The genetic information alone for the remaining participants runs at about 400TBs. This has put a huge strain on the centres storage facilities. Over the past decade there has been an increased shift in processing requirements. Computational power is another issue that needed addressing.
The University of Edinburgh contacted Novatech to address these growing concerns, and to design a solution. The end result was a 4U server running 4x Intel Xeon processors with 3TB’s of RAM.
This now allows the centre to work in a multiprocessor environment with 144 processing threads. For example, just one of many tests would have taken between 3 and 4 weeks to analyse, but with the new Novatech server, that process takes just 2 days.
Using data from The Lothian Birth Cohorts and UK Biobank, The University of Edinburgh's Centre for Cognitive Ageing & Cognitive Epidemiology have set out to discover just what those factors are.