How Data Storage Can Empower STEM Leaders to Dream Big

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-or STEM-have been gaining steam and changing the world. The acronym, introduced by administrators at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2001, has become a driving force of awareness and support for a wide range of projects and educational opportunities.

Learning institutions, from elementary schools to universities, have developed curricula around STEM, in part to encourage students into the career path. And, we'll need them: One study by Pew Research found that employment in STEM occupations has grown 79% since 1990. Even more compelling is the possibility that a majority of the STEM jobs that will be needed in 10 or 20 years don't even exist yet.

How do you even prepare for projects that can feel largely unknown? What tools and technologies will the engineers of the future need to tackle tomorrow's challenges?

The STEM/Storage Connection: Innovation Can't Wait for Tech to Keep Up

STEM and data have always gone hand in hand. But modern STEM projects are so data-driven, many rely on high-performance computing systems to make a dent in the data. These systems are capable of handling the intense workloads those projects generate, powering the data analytics applications, AI and machine learning, and image processing that are often key to STEM projects.

Those millions of data points need to be fast and available to turn them into groundbreaking insights in the lab, classroom, or factory. In fact, storage, as unassuming as it sometimes seems, has proven to be time and again the "secret sauce" behind major breakthroughs. It's empowering STEM professionals to dream big, save lives, and make discoveries that shake the world's long-held paradigms.

When your project could lead to a cure for a fatal disease, the breakthrough needed to begin reversing climate change, or the next scientific discovery that upends our beliefs about our place in the universe, there's no room for downtime.

Modern STEM will need a modern approach to storage-one that, in the spirit of STEM, blends science, innovation, and sustainability to change the world.

STEM Pioneers Making Breakthroughs with Pure Storage

Modern storage must be uncomplicated, easy to manage and access, and flexible enough to support an organization's unique specifications. Let's take a closer look at some real-life STEM-focused organizations that were able to overcome their storage challenges and realize STEM success.

Understanding Our World: From Cellular Processes and Ocean Currents to the Origins of the Universe

Ranked as one of the global top 100 universities in the world due to its reputation for excellence in research, The University of Western Australia (UWA), based in Perth, has more than 28,000 students tackling STEM projects. All of these initiatives are enhanced by UWA's high-performance computing infrastructure to handle data, analysis, and modeling.

By implementing the new Pure Storage platform, UWA is ready to support the next generation of leaders managing more than 6PB of research data, with the ability to easily scale the infrastructure for its upcoming high-speed research network launch. UWA also was able to reduce their physical storage footprint by 80% and met sustainability goals by lowering power and cooling by 80%.

"Our job is to make sure this environment will support UWA growth and ambitions to promote influential research. Pure has helped us to do that," says Phil Norris, Senior Manager of Network and Systems at UWA.

Powering Breakthroughs in Personalized Medicine

The Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF) undertakes numerous high-impact projects across several fields of STEM, such as genomics, agriculture, health, and environmental science. Their work around personalized medicine and genomics research has unlocked groundbreaking discoveries in cancer treatment, rare diseases, and climate change.

To accelerate its end-to-end genomics pipeline, in particular, AGRF adopted Pure Storage® FlashBlade ®, accelerating the end-to-end genomics pipeline by up to 86% and allowing researchers to move from theory to life-saving applications quicker. Fueled by Pure Storage, AGRF works with the Children's Cancer Institute to bring high-quality sequencing data to support the Zero Childhood Cancer Program. This program works to give children with high-risk cancer access to personalized medicine.

AGRF's work is reshaping our approach to healthcare and paving the way for future advancements. "With Pure, we shaved an average of two weeks from our genomic analyses, which is as close to real time as you can get in personalized medicine today," says Desley Pitcher, National Sales Manager, Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF).

Fighting Disease with Data

Folding@home is a distributed computing project aimed at helping scientists develop new therapeutics for a variety of diseases by harnessing computing power from volunteers around the globe to simulate protein dynamics. Folding@home leverages the unused processing power of personal computers to create a high-speed, high-performance system on which to run its one-of-a-kind research platform.

Pure Storage donated a FlashBlade system for use by Folding@home, which completely changed the project's approach to storage. They had been faced with hundreds of thousands of redistributed workloads, all of which were sending small bits of data to a core or cloud to be processed and then to a high-performance solution for reassembly that was reaching its limit.

Greg Bowman, Folding@home's Director, says, "We have three primary labs, each with two or three servers sending simulations to volunteers and collecting all the data; teams of scientists analyzing the data and deciding what to simulate; etc. We very quickly got into a situation where volunteers were turning on the software and nothing was happening because our servers couldn't keep up. With FlashBlade installed, we'll be able to keep pace with all the simulations and data moving around right now."

With a unified fast file and object (UFFO) storage platform from Pure Storage, Folding@home can separate capacity from compute and accelerate the ability to arm scientists with the bevy of resources needed in their quest to develop a vaccine.

Building a Foundation for Future STEM Success through Data Innovation

Traditional storage solutions simply can't deliver the low latency and high performance these projects require. They can't provide data to projects and applications fast and seamlessly enough, so researchers and technicians are slowed down as they wait for results to be processed.

Discover how the Pure Storage platform is driving more stories of STEM success.

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