SCIENCE

Adaptive Computing announced that The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) has chosen Moab Adaptive HPC Suite to manage the organization’s new high performance computing facility. With Adaptive Computing’s flexible technology, the ICR can now process and workflow-manage large data sets of its researchers’ genetic and molecular discoveries, and employ key reporting features to inform its diverse group of stakeholders and advise on the future expansion of its high performance computing capability.

“Through the recent creation of our Scientific Computing Unit, the ICR determined that our current workload solution would not be sufficient to process the vast amounts of expected data from all of our multi-disciplinary researchers,” said Jon Lockley, head of scientific computing at The Institute of Cancer Research. “We required a tailor-made solution that would offer greater integration between the generation, transfer and management of very large data-sets and the use of high performance computing systems, and offer opportunities to expand in the future.”

The ICR, together with The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, forms the largest comprehensive cancer center in Europe, and one of the leading centers in the world. The ICR Scientific Strategy aims to develop key research programs through three interlinked themes: genetics and epidemiology, therapeutic development and molecular pathology.

“With the flexibility of Moab Adaptive HPC Suite, the ICR’s multiple stakeholders can contribute vital research data to a central service, and also demonstrate the value of the system back to that community,” said Michael Jackson, president of Adaptive Computing. “Adaptive Computing is proud to serve as the workflow optimizer and data manager behind the ICR’s life-changing research.”

The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR)

• The ICR is Europe’s leading cancer research centre.
• The ICR has been ranked the UK’s top academic research centre, based on the results of the Higher Education Funding Council’s Research Assessment Exercise.
• The ICR works closely with partner The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust to ensure patients immediately benefit from new research. Together the two organisations form the largest comprehensive cancer centre in Europe.
• The ICR has charitable status and relies on voluntary income, spending 90 pence in every pound of total income directly on research.
• As a college of the University of London, the ICR also provides postgraduate higher education of international distinction.
• Over its 100-year history, the ICR’s achievements include identifying the potential link between smoking and lung cancer which was subsequently confirmed, discovering that DNA damage is the basic cause of cancer and isolating more cancer-related genes than any other organisation in the world.
• The ICR is home to the world’s leading academic cancer drug development team. Several important anti-cancer drugs used worldwide were synthesised at the ICR and it has discovered an average of two preclinical candidates each year over the past five years.