Case Studies - The Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Sector
As in the financial industry, companies in the pharmaceutical and bioengineering sector also rely on their ability to run ever more detailed and accurate simulations as a source of competitive advantage. Inaccuracy, downtime and data loss can all critically affect the company’s performance in developing the latest drugs. Here, again, the resilience, flexibility and power of Grid and Cloud technologies come into their own, and unsurprisingly the literature provides a wealth of success stories.
Worldwide Grid helps the fight against heart disease. Worldwide Grid helps the fight against Heart Disease Recent research work on the genetic causes of one of the world’s biggest killers, coronary artery disease has been conducted by teams from the Cardiogenics consortium using the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) infrastructure.
The Future of Healthcare: eHealth and Grid Computing
Financial benefits of a Grid MP implementation
Institute for Genomic Research
The Friedrich Miescher Institute
Financial Benefits of a Grid MP Implementation
Company: Fortune 100 company, top 5 pharmaceutical company
Business: Grid MP implementation for pharmaceutical industry
This white paper examines the financial implications of using grid software. The calculations are based on a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical firm. The calculations of financial benefits described are also applicable to other pharmaceutical and other industries. Entire document avaiable here.
Grid / cloud provider : Univa UD
Business: Radiotherapy treatment for cancer patients
Grid technology provider: BEinGRID
RadiotherapyGrid is a solution based on Grid technology that helps hospitals plan the best possible radiotherapy treatment for cancer patients. It has two core functions: verification of plans using accurate, but computationally expensive, techniques and searching for the optimal treatments. RadiotherapyGrid uses Grid resources to quickly process treatment plans, improving the speed and accuracy of radiotherapy services.
Grid computing case study provided by: BEinGRID
Please see the RadiotherapyGrid case study videos and the case study PDF.
Company: Pathwork Diagnostics, Inc
Business: Molecular diagnostics
Cloud Technology: Unicloud
Pathwork Diagnostics, Inc. develops molecular diagnostic tests to aid oncologists in the diagnosis of hard-to-identify cancer tumors. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for pay-per-use computing and Univa UD’s UniCloud product to build high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in the EC2 cloud, in order to perform their compute-intensive research. This case studies looks at the ins and outs of how this has been achieved.
Cloud computing case study provided by: Univa UD
Cloud Computing at Pathwork Diagnostics, Inc.
Company: Cognigen
Business: Consultant to the life sciences sector
Grid technology provider: Sun Grid
Consultant and analyst firm Cognigen Corporation uses a highly CPU-intensive application, NONMEM, for modeling drug variability within humans. They needed a scalable solution so that scientists could submit jobs without running checks of server availability. After evaluating a number of solutions, Cognigen chose the Sun ONE Grid Engine software and Sun's Netra X1 server. The GUI provides Cognigen with a convenient management tool for administering the Grid. In addition, they lowered the total cost of ownership and dramatically increased productivity.
Grid computing case study provided by: Sun
Grid Computing at Cognigen Corporation
Business: Bioscience investigation
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2008
CIC bioGUNE’s Functional Genomics Unit uses genetic analysis to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie hereditary diseases. This will allow the development of therapeutic strategies and diagnostic systems, both for hereditary diseases and to predict individual sensitivity to particular drugs.
Atos Origin designed a grid-based solution that fulfilled CIC bioGUNE expectations, leading to a performance boost 25x with the same departmental hardware - from 3 hours to 7 minutes.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-Tude.com
Company: Top 20 Global Pharmaceutical
Business: Pharmaceutical and commercial healthcare products
Grid technology employed: UniCluster Express
Date: September 2008
Dissatisfied with the license model of their existing cluster software 0product (Platform™ LSF®)1, the company’s Research IT team began seeking alternatives that would provide all the functionality the customer was used to, but at a reduced overall cost. Following an initial test UniCluster Express was running in production – and by the end of the week all applications had been migrated to UniCluster. The company saved 80% on cluster software costs improved manageability via UniCluster’s management and monitoring console and reduce complexity
Grid computing case study provided by: Univa UD
Grid computing at a top20 pharmaceutical
Company: EGEE
Business: A consortium-based research project
Date: April 2006
A collaboration of Asian and European laboratories uses in silico techniques to analyse 300,000 possible drug components against the avian flu virus using the Grid infrastructure set up by the EGEE.
Provided by EGEE
Company: Institute for Genomic Research
Business: Genetic research
Grid technology provider: Sun Grid
The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) is a non-profit organization dedicated to deciphering and analyzing genetic sequences. To achieve higher performance at lower cost, TIGR migrated and consolidated processing for a core genetic sequencing application from a HP AlphaServer Tru64 platform to a high-performance computing grid infrastructure using Sun Fire x64 servers running Sun N1 Grid Engine and Linux that met TIGR’s requirements, and more, reducing system problem-resolution time from one week to a few hours.
Provided by Sun
Grid Computing at the Institute for Genomic Research
Company: Famar and Wyeth Hellas
Business: Pharmaceuticals
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2008
SCM (Supply Chain Management) comprises a rapidly growing market with its main emphasis being on supplier collaboration opportunities coupled with inventory optimization and process efficiencies across the supply chain. Any supply chain today – regardless of the sector it serves – is made up of an increasingly labyrinthine network of materials, equipment and services suppliers requiring efficient management for its smooth, cost effective and successful operation.
In this pilot implementation, different entities (suppliers, distributors, pharmacies) accessed information related to their role in the supply chain and their network of collaborating companies. A customized portal offered per role access to the Grid e-procurement services to the different users of the system through which stock management and order processing capabilities were validated.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-Tude.com
Grid computing at Famar and Wyeth Hellas
Company: Laboratory of Neuro Imaging
Business: Neurological research
Grid technology provider: Sun Grid
Date: February 2006
The Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is one of the country's foremost neurological research centres. With the intention of ensuring a high level of productivity for researchers, shortening execution times of critical applications and maximizing utilization of computing resources, it deployed a 306-node cluster of Sun Fire V20z servers running Sun N1 Grid Engine software, which manages the lab's servers as a computing service. Each Sun Fire V20z server has dual 64-bit 2.4 gigahertz AMD Opteron processors with four gigabytes of memory.
Provided by Sun
Grid Computing at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging
Company: Applied Biosystems
Business: Instrumentation for the life sciences sector
Grid technology Provider: Sun Utility Computing
Date: March 2006
Applied Biosystems serves the life science industry and research community by developing and marketing instrument-based systems, consumables, software and services. Customers use these tools to analyze nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), small molecules and proteins to make scientific discoveries, develop new pharmaceuticals and conduct standardized testing. Applied Biosystems used utility computing in the form of the Sun Grid Compute Utility to develop genotyping assays as quickly as possible, in response to newly released data, without having to worry about capital investments.
Provided by Sun
Grid Computing at applied Biosystems
Company: University Health Care System
Business: Hospital network
Grid Technology Provider: IBM
University Health Care System is a not-for-profit community hospital network that serves 25 counties throughout Georgia and parts of South Carolina, USA. The transformation into a digital healthcare facility had created the need to improve the scalability, reliability and resiliency of the hospital’s information storage infrastructure. Using IBM’s Grid Medical Archive Solution allowed them to protect data and simplify the deployment, operation and management of the massive fixed-content storage systems.
Provided by IBM.
Grid Computing at University Health Care System
Company: State University of New York
Business: Bioinformatics research
Grid Technology Provider: Platform LSF
Date: 2005
State University of New York (SUNY) required large computational power to support biological research for its Bioinformatics department. A solution was put together using 1,900 Dell PowerEdge 1650 servers using Platform LSF® software. As a consequence SUNY researchers can accomplish work previously reserved for multimillion dollar supercomputers and mainframes, at a fraction of the cost.
Case Study provided by Platform
Grid computing at the State University of New York
Company: The Friedrich Miescher Institute
Business: Biomedical Research
Grid Technology Provider: Digipede
Date: July 2006
The Friedrich Miescher Institute, part of the Novartis Research Foundation, carries out biomedical research. As part of this work they analyse thousands of genetic sequences. However, although a very powerful tool, this could take several hours to complete when based on a single server. With the intention of running the application on a Grid so that the service could be offered through a website, the institute turned to Digipede for a robust and flexible Grid solution.
Case Study provided by Digipede
Grid Computing at the The Friedrich Miescher Institute
Company: Incyte Genomics
Business: Drug Discovery
Grid Technology Provider: Platform
With one of the industry’s largest Linux-based data centres, drug discovery company Incyte Genomics needed to optimize its heterogeneous compute resources to accelerate discovery. Incyte selected Platform LSF® and Platform Analyzer on a Linux cluster of 1,200 CPUs for a dedicated production pipeline, where several million jobs will be handled automatically, resulting in significant reduction on time-to-market.
Case Study provided by Platform
Grid Computing at Incyte Genomics
E-Health with Mobile Grids: The Akogrimo Heart Monitoring and Emergency Scenario
Business: A consortium-based research project Akogrimo
Date: 03/2006
In this article, you can read a full description of the Akogrimo heart monitoring and emergency scenario using Mobile Grids and an answer to the question: Why is Grid useful in this case?
The aim of this technology is to take into acount the mobility of patients. It form therefor networks of patient, electromic health records, mobile medical experts and so on.
The full Whitepaper starts with a short description of challenges and perspectives of the healthcare domain. Then you can read about patient's mobility and high computation time which are the reasons of using Mobile Grids in this domain. In addition, the paper gives a description of an emergency scenario. As a conclusion, you will find which are the new business opportunities for Network and Application Service Provides.
E-Health with Mobile Grids: The Akogrimo Heart Monitoring and Emergency Scenario
