The Top 3 Grid Application Areas for Pharma R&D: Drug Discovery, Clinical Analysis and Data Management

Contents:

• Challenges in Pharma R&D
  
• Top 3 Application Areas Where Grid Can Deliver Value
  
• Customer Testimonials
  
• Best Practices For Getting Started
  
• About Grid MP and Univa UD

Challenges in Pharma R&D
With the high volume and density of data required for processing in most Pharma R&D environments, along with the growing complexity of IT ecosystem and the pressures of competition and regulatory groups, life sciences organizations need IT infrastructure and management tools that can respond quickly to changing needs and, more importantly, enable rather than hamper the ability to innovate.

Univa UD Grid MP solutions for accelerating in silico R&D, clinical simulation, and business intelligence tools mean our customers achieve greater levels of innovation in shorter timeframes while maximizing license utilization, increasing ROI, and realizing significant savings.

Top 3 Application Areas Where Grid Can Deliver Value
Grid MP is proven to deliver value in Pharma R&D. Our clients are finding more and more ways to leverage Grid MP. Here are the top 3 areas where grid has delivered quantifiable business value for our customers:

1. Drug Discovery – From sequence analysis to virtual high-throughput screening, in silico tools require high-performance compute power to process growing amounts of available data. By grid-enabling commercial or proprietary tools, organizations can process wider molecular libraries in search of new leads and can run jobs concurrently for reduced project timelines.

Top applications in this area include:

• Docking / virtual high-throughout screening: LigandFit, GOLD, FlexX, THINK, DOCK, Glide
  
• Gene / protein sequence analysis: BLAST, HMMER
  
• Protein folding: Rosetta

2. Clinical Development – Customers are improving the speed and scope of PK/PD and other clinical data analysis tools by using Univa UD solutions to schedule and run jobs concurrently – now thousands more models can be analyzed at a time.

Top applications in this area include:

• Clinical statistical analysis: Archimedes, NONMEM, SAS, SPSS, TrialSimulator

3. Business Intelligence – Running ETL, text mining, and other data management tools on a Univa UD enterprise grid accelerates critical prescription data mining and reporting projects. This means minimized project timelines, improved accuracy and scope in reporting, and ultimately improved decision-making... not to mention the cost benefits of better utilizing existing resources.

Top applications in this area include:

• Data analysis: SAS, SPSS
  
• ETL: SyncSort

Customer Testimonials

• Drug Discovery

• “In the end, J&J's grid should make drug discovery faster and more economical. It should also enhance patient safety and fine-tune therapeutics.” – Johnson & Johnson PRD
• " We’ve saved at least $2 million based on the 2700 seats we have currently." – Novartis
  
• “Ease of deployment and availability of applications were strong selling points for us. We also knew from Univa UD’s other enterprise deployments that massive scaling and security capabilities were already proven.” – Sanofi-Aventis

• Clinical Development

• “What used to take months can now be done in weeks.” – GlaxoSmithKline
  
• “The distributed computing system will revolutionize not only how we do our work, but the accuracy of the decisions people make.” – American Diabetes Association
  
• "The Grid MP platform keeps track of all the data related to our job runs – where the job was executed, what type of machine, how long it took. So not only does the grid save us time, but in automating this function it allows us to define a validated process for job execution. That goes a long way toward achieving FDA compliance." – GlaxoSmithKline

• Business Intelligence

• “We get through a lot more data a lot more efficiently now.” – Children’s Memorial Research Center
  
• “The grid solution with SPSS has literally changed our definition of what is possible. Where before we were able to scan only a few thousand articles a day, now we can examine 100,000 articles in the same amount of time. We can also pull out more concepts from and can rerun the data in different ways, rather than just once, to improve the precision and quality of what we learn. It’s a dramatic increase in scope that analysts and researchers in other fields are going to want to achieve as well.” – Children’s Memorial Research Center

Best Practices for Getting Started
If you’re considering a grid solution within an R&D area, the concerns you are most likely faced with include:

• Keeping the implementation unobtrusive
  
• Finding the right applications to grid-enable
  
• Ensuring scalability and security
  
• Finding a trusted, reliable vendor

Univa UD can help you determine how best to get your grid up and running – with hundreds of successful Grid MP implementations, we're the experts at delivering high-value grid solutions and services.

Here’s how most customers get started:

1. Identify an application for grid-enablement
   It's important to choose a good-fit application for your grid. Univa UD can help you identify this – read about our service offerings in this area, and contact us to request more information.
2. Request a demo and/or business case consultation
   Many customers like to see their chosen grid infrastructure working with an application similar to those they use in house. We can set up a remote Grid MP demo in our Collaboration Center so you can experience a Univa UD solution before deploying. We can also consult with you on how to build a business case for grid computing within your organization.
3. Deploy a single-site desktop harvesting solution
   Many customers already know the applications they want grid-enabled, and skip directly to this step. It’s fast and easy to get a desktop “grid” up and running – our team can typically install your single-site grid in just a few days

To request more information, visit: http://www.univaud.com/about/contact/request-info.php.

About Grid MP
Univa UD’s Grid MP allows organizations to coordinate and share existing computing, application, data, storage, and network resources across departmental and geographically dispersed organizations. By harnessing the underutilized compute power of its existing resources – including workstations, clusters and data centers – an organization can create a powerful new resource capable of delivering high-performance processing power to run compute-intensive applications in extremely reduced timeframes. As a result, project scope can be increased and new projects tackled without sacrificing speed or quality of work.

Grid MP allows businesses to attack the problem of insufficient compute power in the most efficient and cost effective way possible – by leveraging the compute resources they’ve already invested in. Using Grid MP solutions, organizations are able to significantly increase the speed, scope and quality of their analysis projects, resulting in improved productivity and substantial return on invested capital (ROIC). In contrast to more traditional high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, the Grid MP solution increase in power over time (Moore’s Law) and never depreciate in value.

This technology delivers high-performance computing power for a fraction of the cost, enabling:

• Dramatically accelerated runtimes for compute intensive applications
  
• Increased project scope & accuracy of results
  
• Significantly reduced IT spending
  
• Increased ROIC on existing compute resources

About Univa UD
Univa UD is the leading provider of high-performance computing (HPC) systems management software for the complete distributed computing lifecycle. Univa UD products simplify the complex nature of deploying and operating cluster and grid computing environments and save customers time and resources while giving them confidence that their solution will perform as expected. Hundreds of Global 2000 companies come to Univa UD to build and operate their HPC infrastructures, from small-scale work group clusters to enterprise grids. With a community-enabled open source model and a focus on making business easier for our customers, Univa UD is advancing the vision and practice of HPC.

For more information, contact us Univa UD at 1-800-370-5320 or visit us at www.univaud.com.

Click here to request expert info on grid-enabling your Pharma R&D applications.