IBM Platform Computing Solutions for Life Sciences

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Download the IBM Platform Computing Life Sciences White Paper

Download the IBM Platform Computing Life Sciences White Paper

Massive amounts of computing power and data are needed for effective and efficient processing for many areas that are considered in the Life Science domain. From drug design to genomic sequencing and risk analysis , many workflows require that the tools and processes be in place so that entire organizations are more effective. IBM Platform Computing Solutions provide innovative tools and products to manage these workflows that avoid bottlenecks for entire organizations.

The challenges that life sciences related organizations face are complex and involve all aspects of the computing, storage, and network infrastructure.  Heterogeneous computing systems can speed up the workflow process, but bring with it a management nightmare, how to manage all of these systems. From a high performance cluster based on site, to a cloud computing environment, the tools and solutions required for consistent system management and workflow optimization are required and can lead to faster time to market and a better utilization of the available computing components.

Within many organizations, there are different computing requirements, based both on application profiles (small number of cores vs. many cores), user requirements (meeting a deadline), and ISV licensing restrictions. All of these demands need to be managed such that the maximum work gets performed without users competing for resources and creating bottlenecks.  The IBM Platform Computing solutions include the following components for managing both inhouse and cloud based technical computing workloads.

  • IBM Platform HPC
  • IBM Platform LSF
  • IBM Platform Cluster Manager
  • IBM General Purpose File System (GPFS)

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute implemented the IBM Platform LSF workload management solution which resulted in running up to a half a million sequence matching jobs a day and allowed the system administrators to easily manage workloads in a heterogeneous IT infrastructure.

IBM has also created reference architecture-based platforms for speeding up the implementation phase of working with leading applications such as Accelrys, CLC bio, Gaussian, InfoSphere, and mpiBLAST.  These reference architectures allow for organizations to get up and running faster, as these solutions have been tuned for the specific workloads that certain organizations depend on.

Through the use of these software tools together with detailed reference architectures, time to market is reduced and IT assets are used more efficiently. The IBM Platform Computing Solutions: Life Sciences solution brief explains how IBM can help you to optimize the resources available and reduce costs.  Download the solution brief now.