By: TOP500 Team

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Richard Holland from the Pistoia Alliance writes that high-performance computing can help pharmaceutical companies cut the time they spend on research and development, but HPC is not a panacea and its deployment needs to be nuanced and appropriate.

The challenges facing informatics systems in the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D laboratories are changing. The number of large-scale computational problems in the life sciences is growing and they will need more high-performance solutions than their predecessors. But the response has to be nuanced: HPC is not a cure-all for the computational problems of pharma R&D. Some applications are better suited to the use of HPC than others and its deployment needs to be considered right at the beginning of experimental design.

With this in mind, the Pistoia Alliance hosted a webinar at the beginning of October on opportunities for high-performance computing (HPC) in pharmaceutical R&D. The Pistoia Alliance is a global, not-for-profit alliance of life science companies, vendors, publishers, and academic groups that work together to lower barriers to innovation in R&D. We bring together the key constituents to identify the root causes of inefficiencies in R&D, through pre-competitive collaboration.

Professor Peter Coveney of University College London chaired the webinar and his key point — backed by the other speakers, Matt Gianni of Cray and Darren Green of GSK – was that for HPC to be useful in pharma R&D it should produce results that are rapid, accurate, and reproducible. To illustrate the potential impact of well-designed HPC solutions, Coveney described his group’s work on an improved virtual screening tool for predicting binding affinities of compounds with target proteins that could run in only ten hours on an HPC facility with 10,000 cores, a result that would have been unfeasibly slow to achieve using more traditional computing resources.

Read the full article on insideHPC.