Two years ago, Bio-IT World first reported on a little-known topic of “cloud computing,” when former BioTeam consultant Mike Cariaso recounted his early experiments with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It turned out his colleagues were also dabbling with the cloud, and they soon realized that this was more than just a cute toy for computer geeks.
Today, many life science and pharma organizations have had the same epiphany. Cloud computing provides an opportunity to rent immense high-performance computing capability, when it is needed. Rather than building and maintaining their own HPC cluster, or “leasing” an on-demand HPC service offered by the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems, the cloud can be tapped as needed. As made popular by Amazon, the resource is affordable (billing is typically hours times number of CPUs) and remarkably efficient. A job that might take 40 hours on a 10-node cluster could instead be run on a 400-node cloud cluster in 60 minutes—for the same cost.
