Interesting Snippets

pharmaceutical companies are saving money by renting only the computing power they need, and paying for it by the hour.

“We have customers that are running very large-scale drug discovery pipelines,” Wood says.

One customer, for example, wanted to run a virtual screening of 21 million chemical compounds.

“So you can imagine 50,000 laptops running this experiment. They didn’t have to buy or provision or manage or cool or power any of those laptops, or set them up….

The entire experiment took about three hours, and the cost was less than $15,000. In contrast, Wood says, if the company had tried to do this in-house, it would have had to spend millions on computers, and the job might have taken years to complete.