The UberCloud Experiment – Exploring Life Sciences in the Cloud

Grazed from Bio-ITWorld. Author: Wolfgang Gentzsch.

Cost savings, shorter time to market, better quality, less product failures: the benefits that engineers and scientists can expect from using technical computing in their research, design, and development processes can be huge. Yet, still relatively few scientist and manufacturers use servers when designing and developing their products on computers. The vast majority still perform virtual prototyping or large-scale data modeling on workstations or laptops. Not surprising, many of them face problems due to the lack of performance of their machines. More accurate geometry or physics, for instance, require much more memory than a desktop can be fitted with.

There are two realistic options today to acquire additional computing: buy a server or use a Cloud solution. Many system vendors have developed a complete set of products, solutions and services for high performance computing (HPC), but buying an HPC server for a small to medium enterprise may still be more of an investment than many wish to make…

A Cloud solution allows engineers and scientists to keep using their workstation for daily design and development work and to "burst" the larger, more complex jobs into the Cloud when needed. Thus, users have access to quasi-infinite computing resources that offer higher-quality results. A Cloud solution helps reduce capital expenditure, offers greater business agility by dynamically scaling resources up and down as needed, and is only paid for when used…

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