CLOUD

BASINGSTOKE, UK -- Platform Computing, a leader in distributed computing software, today announced that AstraZeneca, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, has chosen Platform LSF to create and manage three heterogeneous large-scale compute farms within its Discovery Function. The computing power of these farms, located on sites in England and Sweden, will be used by AstraZeneca's research and development teams around the world to support one of the best research and development pipelines in the life sciences industry, maximizing the company's investment in hardware and software. Sandra McLaughlin, Senior Systems Administrator, Physical and Structural Sciences, AstraZeneca UK, explains, "In our bid to provide medicines to constantly improve human health, we face a continual challenge of how to provide researchers with the amount of power demanded by the most computationally intense applications. Large-scale clusters allow us to manage and share computing resources across the entire Discovery Function, accelerating drug discovery, design and time-to-market, and realize our investment in hardware. Platform LSF has more than proved itself so far and is now the preferred solution for managing compute farms in AstraZeneca." AstraZeneca will use Platform LSF on three heterogeneous compute farms, two in England and one in Sweden, to provide the computing power needed to accelerate drug discovery, design and time to market. These sites include: * Alderley Park, Cheshire, UK: AstraZeneca's Enabling Science and Technology department has invested in 130 Platform LSF licenses to manage its compute farm, consisting of 110 IBM Linux servers and 8 SGI IRIX servers. The computing power created by this farm is used for chemo-informatics, molecular modeling and accelerating high throughput structure-based drug discovery and design. * Blackley, UK: The Discovery Information Systems department near Manchester runs a compute farm consisting of 204 Compaq ES40 servers, with over 200 Platform LSF licenses. AstraZeneca sites all over the world use the compute power provided for bio-informatics. * Molndal, Sweden: AstraZeneca R&D site, near to Gothenburg, has a SGI IRIX server farm that provides compute power for computational chemistry, docking and screening to a team of over 200 scientists. Alain Wiedmer, Vice President, European Sales, Platform Computing, says, "Creating compute farms through the use of Platform LSF allows organizations like AstraZeneca to carry out in silico discovery and accelerates drug target validation and leads identification. Building a computing Grid is the next logical step for any organization facing computationally demanding applications. With Grid computing, enterprises can accelerate time-to-market and dramatically impact the bottom line." Platform LSF is a workload management solution that optimizes the use of enterprise-wide computing resources by controlling and co-ordinating computing jobs across multiple geographic locations. It addresses the high-throughput computational requirements of modern life sciences computing environments by providing transparent and on demand access to valuable computing resources. From a single cluster of Linux compute farms, to Microsoft Windows desktops or worldwide Grids of distributed computing systems, Platform LSF delivers consistent performance and scalability in distributing applications and executing workload. Life sciences organizations around the world utilize Platform's distributed computing solutions in the discovery process to maximize the productivity and potential of their existing technology investments. Platform seamlessly integrates with and distributes application workload, allowing scientists to exploit and analyze diverse types and sources of biological data in a shorter period of time, deliver more accurate results to reduce failure rates and enable better decision-making earlier in the discovery process. Platform solutions currently distribute computing jobs to servers and workstations in more than half of the Fortune 500 pharmaceutical and chemical companies. Platform solutions enabled the world renowned Sanger Institute to crack the DNA code of Chromosome 22, paving the way for huge advances in medical diagnosis and treatment. Platform also played an integral role in enabling Celera Genomics to map the human genome more than two years ahead of schedule. For more information visit www.platform.com