DEVELOPER TOOLS

ASPEED Software Corporation has announced the immediate availability of ACCELLERANT for NONMEM, the first solution that enables single-thread NONMEM applications to leverage the performance benefits of multiprocessor, multi-core, cluster, grid and other parallel distributed computing environments. Applying ASPEED’s ACCELLERANT for NONMEM to long running analyses in several of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies has shown 2 to over 4 times run-time reductions, with equal or in some cases, even more precise results. This new software-based solution enhances the performance of the NONMEM software program for Nonlinear Mixed Effect Modeling applications, used by most pharmaceutical and bio-medical organizations to conduct more rapid and potentially comprehensive analysis during the drug development and approval process. The Population Pharmacokinetic/ Pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) methods used are often very time consuming – with numerous long runs and significant complexity for researchers as they carve the analysis into pieces and subsequently aggregate the data to reduce the impact on the overall analysis elapsed time. ACCELLERANT offers a big step to reducing time to market and competitiveness for pharmaceutical firms by decreasing individual run times of NONMEM and leveraging less expensive hardware platforms. ACCELLERANT for NONMEM focuses on accelerating the non-linear regression analysis used in the PK/PD. Unlike linear algorithms, NONMEM is not readily parallelized to exploit multi-processor, cluster or grid environments because of calculation data dependencies. Researchers can use ACCELLERANT’s patent-pending technology to more rapidly achieve equal or more precise results without altering the integrity of the underlying logic or forcing NONMEM users to break up a run and manually combine the outputs This ensures more comprehensive analysis and convergence for long running analysis. Once combined with NONMEM, ACCELLERANT software is completely transparent to application users and maintains the integrity and accuracy of all the existing NONMEM algorithms. This software solution requires no compiler changes and no parallel computing expertise, and can be applied to multi-processor/multi-core desktops as well as to local workgroups, clusters or grids. “NONMEM simulations are at the heart of most critical processes within the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, where ensuring fast, accurate and affordable decision-making is a top-of-mind issue,” said Kurt Ziegler, ASPEED’s evp of product management. “ACCELLERANT for NONMEM responds to these challenges, allowing organizations to take full advantage of parallel and distributed computing for run time reduction and improved precision – without the need for costly and time-consuming application changes.” ACCELLERANT for NONMEM applies a simple automated update to the GloboMax NONMEM product. Once ACCELLERANT for NONMEM has been integrated, the researcher simply needs to run the analysis as before and select the number of CPUs/Multi-cores to apply to the specific run. The update of NONMEM to include ACCELLERANT does not change the standard NONMEM logic. It runs the non-linear regression in parallel looking for convergence. ACCELLERANT for NONMEM’s unique features include: • Full compatibility with Windows, Linux and Unix platforms using GCC, Portland Group and Intel Optimized versions of FORTRAN • Advanced functionality that deploys the calculation to number of CPUs requested • Run transparently across the single/multi-core, multi-processor desktop systems, workgroup, Platform LSF or United Devices grid infrastructure • A one-time compile NONMEM update, which can be invoked as usual ACCELLERANT for NONMEM is available from ASPEED Software. It is licensed with an annual subscription fee based on the number of concurrently used CPUs. NONMEM licenses are available from GloboMax.