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Company Success Stories - Aventis
Aventis Speeds Pharmaceutical Research with Help of AMD Athlon™ MP Processor-based Cluster
Profile
Aventis
March 18, 2003
"We're excited about the potential of powerful computing clusters. It’s making a substantial difference in the way we do research. - Anil Nair, senior associate scientist"
For Aventis, a world leader in the discovery, development and marketing of innovative pharmaceutical products, technology integration is a key factor in reducing the time from early research to launching a new drug in the market. Reducing this development time can ultimately help bring innovative treatments for diseases, such as cancer and diabetes, to patients sooner.
The challenges facing Aventis and other pharmaceutical companies are daunting. The industry’s rule of thumb is that it takes 10 to 15 years from initial research to commercial availability of a new drug. The time lag between the research idea and the market reality is compounded by uncertainty. Years can be invested in the development of drugs that are never brought to market.
Scientists at the company's research facility in Tucson, Arizona meet these challenges every day with help from significant investments in computer-assisted drug design. One investment currently showing great promise is a 34-node cluster computer developed by California-based PSSC Labs that features AMD Athlon™ MP processors. PSSC Labs has delivered AMD Athlon MP processor-based, high-performance Beowulf clusters to government, university and research facilities worldwide.
The AMD Athlon MP processor-based cluster system is helping researchers with the needle-in-a-haystack hunt to identify small molecules that will either inhibit or activate a targeted protein. Altering the functions of these proteins by identifying small molecules is the key to treating diseases, such as cancer and diabetes. If researchers begin with structural information of the target protein, they believe they can find the small molecules much more quickly by using computer-aided “virtual screening” tools during the early stages of research.
“Previously, researchers were limited by the speed with which ‘virtual screening’ of small molecule libraries was performed,” said Anil Nair, senior associate scientist at Aventis’ research facility. “With the AMD Athlon™ MP processor-based cluster, I can utilize parallel processing to work through myriad possibilities to eliminate the bad ones and find the best choice. We can perform a ‘virtual screen’ on 10,000 or more small molecules each day.”
The capacity of the AMD Athlon MP processor-based cluster to meet compute-intense challenges, such as sorting through the vast mathematical possibilities of molecular research, derives in large part from the performance of the floating-point engine within the processor. “There's no question that one of the great strengths of the AMD Athlon MP processor is its ability to crunch numbers,” said Alex Lesser, vice president of PSSC Labs. “We regularly recommend AMD processor-based systems to our customers who perform floating-point intensive calculations.”
Given the extended process of drug discovery, one critical measure of performance is reliability. “The AMD Athlon MP processor-based system has proven itself to be highly reliable and we’re very pleased,” Nair said.
Nair is eager to build upon the current increase in productivity by adding more nodes to his system, saying he plans to double the size in the coming year with the expectation that it will double researchers’ productivity.
“We're excited about the potential of this very powerful new tool,” he said. “It’s making a substantial difference in the way we do research.”
© 2003 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Athlon, and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other product names used are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.
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