High-performance computing (HPC) continues to transform and expand innovation in life sciences organizations. HPC helps to increase the productivity of drug discovery, reduce clinical development time, and speed time to market. HPC further aids in personalizing therapies and drugs giving rise to effective and potent medicines with minimal adverse side effects. In addition to managing huge computing tasks, scientists and researchers are also challenged to solve a wide range of biological, chemical, imaging, clinical, and interdisciplinary systems problems. This continues to push the envelope in HPC in life sciences. Life sciences organizations face increasing requirements for HPC capacity in order to process, manage, and mine ever-expanding quantities of data. HPC has come to play a crucial role in helping these organizations with discovery, development, and diagnostic decisions.
Dealing with Data Explosion
Structural genomics, functional genomics, and proteomics require analyses of large and diverse data sets. Gene expression array and high-throughput sequencing technologies are now cost-effective and mainstream. But these technologies along with related diagnostic imaging (X-ray, optical, MRI, PET, etc.) generate even more massive medical and clinical data. Life sciences organizations are constantly challenged to look for better HPC solutions to integrate and manage this data explosion in a cost-effective manner.
Growing Analytical Complexity
The increased complexity of statistical and mathematical models used for solving interdisciplinary life science problems further fuels the need for greater HPC capability. Parallel pattern recognition and data mining algorithms based on data-decomposition and distributed query techniques on scalable parallel systems are required to glean insights from exploding data sources.
The role of visualization is very critical as researchers try to understand and decipher complex data in an effort to predict the best paths to take for future therapeutics. With all of these demands, it is increasingly clear that the computing challenges in life sciences will not be adequately met with current data management solutions or incremental improvements in computing speed.
High Performance Infrastructure
Life sciences research requires comprehensive high performance infrastructure solutions that can handle increasingly sophisticated analyses to process the massive amounts of data. The HPC product portfolio from IBM provides the high performance infrastructure demanded by life sciences. IBM offers dedicated industry-standard solutions that are easy to acquire and deploy. The demands in today's life sciences environments are best understood at IBM through innovation and collaborative research efforts with leading life sciences research communities and industries. These collaborative efforts have been translated into widespread scalable parallel computing solutions by IBM. IBM offers a portfolio of solutions through its multi-core processors, very large storage systems, visualization and advanced instrumentation, innovative applications, and middleware. These HPC solutions have proven to be scalable, robust, and can handle high-throughput research with easy to-use features.
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