Why does the HeliScope require such an impressive computer server/Analysis Engine?
Stoops: Number one, the HeliScope Single Molecule Sequencer is very image intensive in its technology for generating sequences. We’ll produce about 5 Terabytes of image data per day, which presents a daunting challenge from a storage perspective, and the perspective of moving the data from the instrument to external storage. So one of the things we’re doing is to limit the amount of data our customers themselves have to store… [Two,] the HeliScope Analysis Engine is a very high-performance image analysis platform and server that does the image analysis on the fly (and will delete those images as part of the process), and stores a digital representation of those images in an object table, which is roughly 1/10 the size of the full image pack. Every object in every image is represented in the object table… We strip out all the background, we’re not saving that, but we are saving every object that we detect, then when we do our base calling, we apply some smart algorithms to figure ou
