CLOUD

Bioinformatics Innovator Leverages UniCloud and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud For Cost Effective, High Volume Processing

Univa UD, the leading provider of software products for HPC systems management and data center environments, announced today that Pathwork Diagnostics, Inc., a molecular diagnostics company focused on oncology, has chosen UniCloud and the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service (Amazon EC2) to provide cloud computing for research needs that require vast computing capacity at peak times.

Pathwork Diagnostics develops molecular diagnostic tests to aid oncologists diagnosing hard-to-identify cancer tumors. Their work includes analyzing large libraries of gene expression profiles from tumor specimens, which requires massive amounts of computational power at certain peak times. Looking to avoid a large hardware investment, Pathwork decided to implement a cloud computing solution and investigated several providers before choosing Amazon EC2 for pay-per-use computing. To build their HPC cloud clusters, Pathwork selected UniCloud which extends Univa UD’s UniCluster product into cloud services like Amazon EC2.

“As a company whose research can be extremely computationally demanding and complex, cloud computing has been a perfect solution, allowing us a significant increase in capacity at times of peak processing,” says Ljubomir Buturovic, Chief Scientist at Pathwork Diagnostics. “With UniCloud and Amazon EC2 we're getting exactly what we need. We pay for HPC power only when we use it, using a cluster management system that's easy to use."

Buturovic added that "UniCloud minimizes both our initial and long-term investments in HPC.”

UniCloud is an extension to Univa UD’s UniCluster stack that provides a pay-per-use and web service model for HPC users. By leveraging proven cloud services that allow users to pay only for capacity that they actually use, companies avoid investments in hardware purchases they don’t really need. The solution is ideal for companies who perform compute-intensive work that only occurs at intervals and is often unpredictable.

“Customers are finding this flexible, on-demand approach to satisfying HPC computing needs not only greatly reduces up-front capital expense, it also gives them access to previously unattainable capacity – allowing large-scale processing that might not have been possible before,” states Gary Tyreman, vice president and general manager, HPC division at Univa UD.

“Amazon Web Services is pleased that Univa UD is leveraging Amazon EC2 into their offering,” said Steve Rabuchin, Director of Developer Relations and Business Development for Amazon Web Services. “Amazon EC2 enables users to develop and deploy applications in a highly available, elastic environment for large scale computing. UniCloud will make it even easier for organizations to extend existing policies and workflows into the Amazon Web Services cloud only paying for capacity that they require.”

For more information on Pathwork’s use of UniCloud in EC2, download the case study at: