Leading Pharmaceutical Company Accelerates Drug Discovery with Voltaire
To help speed up research and discovery for new drugs and medicines, one of the world’s leading 20 pharmaceutical companies selected Voltaire InfiniBand switches as the interconnect for its HP high-performance computing system. Operated by the company’s computational chemistry department, the system accelerates their molecular dynamics simulation software while lowering infrastructure costs so they can bring new drugs and medicines to market faster.
Customer Challenge
Committed to the research, development, manufacturing and marketing of novel products of high value for human and veterinary, medicine, this leading pharmaceutical company had previously installed a high-performance computing system for its computation chemistry group. The system was used to conduct early research on lead compounds or scaffolds for drugs.
In order to vastly reduce their drug discovery time, the team sought a new system that would not only be superior to its current system, but also comparable to its previous SMP-based machine used to run drug discovery applications. A major criterion in their selection for the new system was that the inter-node communication needed to be commensurate with the backplane of the prior SMP system. This meant the new system had to offer high bandwidth and very low latency but at an affordable price. They needed a solution that enabled them to speed up application performance while reducing overall infrastructure costs.
The Voltaire Solution
The company first turned to HP, one of Voltaire’s partners, and selected an HP BladeSystem cluster consisting of 144 BL260 blade servers, each with two Intel® quad-core CPUs and 8 GB memory, in nine enclosures. For the interconnect, Voltaire 20 Gb/s InfiniBand was chosen. The Voltaire Grid Director™ 2004, a 96-port, 20 Gb/s InfiniBand switch is used to connect the nine blade enclosures and to the 10 TB Lustre storage system. The system uses Amber and NAMD MPI-based molecular dynamics software for researching lead compounds and scaffolds for drugs.
Why Voltaire?
After conducting due-diligence and benchmarks on the performance of Voltaire switches versus 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Voltaire was selected because of its lower latency, superior performance and lower cost. In addition, it was determined that the switch’s high, 20 Gb/s bandwidth could improve the I/O throughput of the compute nodes to the company’s Lustre parallel file system. They found that the Voltaire switch enabled them to speed up the discovery process, which is the key to their success
Another deciding factor was Voltaire’s reputation as a well-established provider to the life sciences industry and relationships with the leading ISVs in the market. Additionally, Voltaire has a close partnership with HP, which reflects positively on Voltaire’s image and presence in the market.
The Results
With the help of Voltaire InfiniBand, the new high-performance computing system significantly reduced the amount of time needed to run simulation software and thus increased efficiency. The high bandwidth and low latency provided by the use of Voltaire InfiniBand for the cluster interconnect greatly improves the molecular dynamics simulation software’s performance, allowing for faster and more precise analysis and decreasing time-to-market for new drugs and medicines. The HP system with Voltaire InfiniBand enabled them to speed up the development process while lowering overall infrastructure costs.
With this solution, this leading pharmaceutical company continues to innovate ahead of, and move faster than the competition with the ultimate goal of helping more patients find relief.
Key results delivered by Voltaire InfiniBand solutions:
- Enables faster and more precise analysis accelerating time-to-market for new drugs and medicines
- Accelerates molecular dynamics simulation software to speed-up discovery process for new drugs and medicines
- Improves application performance and storage access while reducing overall infrastructure costs