Biotech on the Grid

It's always been an easy fix: If you needed more computing capacity, you just bought more hardware — and often tossed the old hardware out with the bathwater. Such tactics aren't necessarily cost-effective, though, and more organizations are looking for ways to save money instead of spend it.

Enter grid computing: The ability to add computing capacity through the addition of a single, inexpensive PC server or by borrowing capacity from another area in the organization through software. Grid computing is a type of shared infrastructure environment that uses multiple independent computing clusters comprising resource nodes that allow resources to be used throughout an organization whenever — and wherever — needed. Capacity is easily increased using standardized, reasonably priced processing, storage, and network components. The grid just keeps running as resources are added or borrowed. It runs fast, costs less than more traditional solutions, and because of built-in redundancies, it never breaks.

For the biotech industry, grid computing is leaving behind centralized computers and clusters as the favored processing method for managing multifaceted computations. For example, at the University of Melbourne, Australia, a grid computing solution allowed researchers to develop a virtual laboratory. The research involved the screening of molecules from a chemical database against a protein target to create virus-fighting drugs — a process that can take from three minutes to three hours on a single PC. Considering the thousands of molecules in existence, the research could take years.

With grid computing and the virtual laboratory, however, molecular modeling researchers globally shared computing resources to reduce research time and costs. Researchers log on to the Australian Bio-Grid Portal, create a project, select a molecular target, and upload the information to the grid through authentication.

Pharmaceutical companies are watching grid computing with interest because of its potential to decrease product time-to-market and reduce research costs at the same time. To learn about organizations that can use your resource-integration skills, contact Vinay Singh, Director of IT Staffing, Financial Services & Biotech/Pharma at The Connors Group, at 201-537-0032 or by email at vinay@theconnorsgroup.com.