Seamless computational bio at Chai Discovery | Modal Blog
Jan 15, 2026

Summary
This post highlights how Chai Discovery leverages Modal Volumes for efficient handling of large biological datasets (hundreds of gigabytes) in their ETL pipelines. Previously, these datasets required hours of downloading and indexing per machine. With Modal Volumes, the data is downloaded and indexed once, then instantly shared across all machines, enabling near-instant cold-start attachment and consistent performance. This significantly reduces data setup time for multiple sequence alignment (MSA) workloads and other bioinformatic computations, allowing researchers to start new runs immediately without repeated setup or storage overhead.
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