| Is the Future Of High- Performance Computing For Life Sciences Cloudy? |
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FEBRUARY, 2010 LIFE SCIENCE LEADER High-performance computing (HPC) has come a long way for life sciences. Twenty years ago, expensive parallel supercomputers were required to render proteins in three dimensions (3-D) and run software that helped researchers understand their shape. Now 3-D rendering can be done on graphics cards in workstations, laptops, and even phones.Compute clusters using many commodity servers have replaced expensive parallel supercomputers, but the data and problems being solved have grown to demand increased compute capacity. This leaves companies with large capital investments of fixed-size clusters that have all the traditional challenges of maximizing utilization, minimizing operational costs, and shortening time-to-result for users. |