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Novartis Conducts 39 Yrs of Computing in 11 Hours w/Cycle Computing and Chef

Back in February of last year, we wrote a post about how our friends at Cycle Computing put Chef 11 through its paces with a big compute project for a huge pharmaceutical company. Of course, at the time we couldn’t name the Big Pharma company involved.

Now we can.

Today at the AWS Summit in NYC, Novartis took the main stage to talk about how they worked with the good folks at Cycle Computing:

By leveraging Cycle Computing software and AWS Cloud infrastructure, Novartis was able to accomplish the same work faster, and for far less money.

  • $44 Million in infrastructure
  • 10 Million compounds screened
  • 39 drug design years in 11 hours for a cost of $4,232
  • 3 compounds identified for future work

If you head over to Cycle’s blog you can read all about exactly how this was accomplished, including the role of AWS and, of course, Chef. Here’s a snippet:

Novartis used the CycleSever for workload placement, CycleCloud to orchestrate HPC environments across AWS, with the Chef 11 Server for continuous instance configuration, and HTCondor for job scheduling.

The full story is a really interesting read, so do check it out.

Lucas Welch

Former Chef Employee