The super computer game has traditionally been the
playground of giants - government agencies and a handful of major corporations.
But cloud computing is leveling even this elite realm of technology, a
development underlined by an announcement at a conference on Thursday. A
20-person company, Cycle Computing, a leader in supercomputer software,
recently lashed together a massive super computing cluster, with 50,000
processors, on Amazon Web Services to do drug compound simulations. Its
software was essentially the operating system, tapping resources from several
Amazon data centers. The simulation applications for drug discovery created by
two other small companies, Schrodinger and Nimbus Discovery, ran on top of
Cycle's cluster-managing software. That software bundle performed a daunting
simulation of 21 million chemical compounds to see if they would bind with a
protein target. That run ate up the equivalent of 12.5 processor years, but it
was completed in less than three hours. The computing cost was less than $4,900
a hour.
"This enables small companies and any researcher that
has a grant to do science that they could never do before," Jason Stowe,
chief executive of Cycle Computing, said in an interview. The economics are
striking, but so is the new approach to scientific discovery and exploration.
In the past, even major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, with
internal computing clusters, would typically develop models that virtually
tested some portion of the possible chemical combinations and protein targets -
not the 21 million, as in the Cycle-Schrodinger-Nimbus collaboration. "The
technology allows researchers to leave no sample unconsidered," Mr.Stowe
said. The project announcement was made at the Amazon Web Services conference
in New York. It is further evidence of the remote computing - or cloud -
advance into a field known for its centralised supercomputer centers. Last
fall, an Amazon Web Services cluster ranked 42 in the annual top 500
supercomputers in the world. Supercomputing, according to Mr.Stowe, is
undergoing a rapid evolution that echoes the transformation in data analysis,
made possible by the accelerating surge in digital data and new computing
tools. Government science officials emphasized that trend at a Washington
conference last month, in which several federal agencies announced research
initiatives.
Source: The Economic Times
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