INDUSTRY

IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand customer, Locus Pharmaceuticals, announced the acquisition of Protein Mechanics, another ground-breaking drug discovery company. The union of these two companies will substantially broaden the scope of the their research, improve the accuracy of the drug design process, and decrease the overall cost of drug discovery. Researchers at Locus are working diligently to find a cure for AIDS and other life-threatening diseases and have tapped into IBM supercomputing power, at IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center, to speed the process and decrease the costs associated with such an undertaking. This is a completely new approach to medical research - for the first time, remotely delivered supercomputing power has been used to accelerate drug discovery - marking a significant turning point for technology's impact on the life sciences and, perhaps, the AIDS epidemic itself. IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center gives companies, large and small, access to supercomputing power via the Internet, which enables companies to get supercomputing power when they need it, without having to purchase an actual supercomputer. For Locus, the ability to tap into IBM's supercomputing power has allowed them to concentrate on their core business strengths. The fact that Locus did not have to purchase more supercomputing hardware, freed the financial resources they needed to acquire Protein Mechanics. IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center, located in Poughkeepsie, New York, is accessible to customers worldwide via a secure VPN connection over the Internet. Designed for scalability to meet variable peak demand workloads, the Deep Computing Capacity on Demand operating environment consists of a virtualized cluster of IBM eServer models with related disk storage, network infrastructure, software and services.