In 2013, Novartis ran a project that involved virtually screening 10 million compounds against a common cancer target in less than a week. They calculated that it would take 50,000 cores and close to a $40 million investment if they wanted to run the experiment internally. Partnering with Cycle Computing and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Novartis built a platform leveraging Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and four Availability Zones. The project ran across 10,600 Spot Instances (approximately 87,000 compute cores) and allowed Novartis to conduct 39 years of computational chemistry in 9 hours for a cost of $4,232. Out of the 10 million compounds screened, three were successfully identified.
To learn more about how AWS can help support life science needs, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/life-sciences/.
For more information about how Cycle Computing can help your company run on the AWS Cloud, see Cycle Computing's listing in the AWS Partner Directory.
