Customer Focus: Biotech Company Abtech partner with emerging Biotech firm to provide advanced in-silico screening technology. A privately owned pharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, England has developed a unique computational screening platform technology, that enables the in-silico screening of vast numbers of molecules in a very short space of time. It can achieve this level of performance by using a powerful Linux compute farm solution supplied by Abtech. During the early stages of the programme, the company invested in a 36-node compute farm from a rival manufacturer. The volume of work rapidly began to stretch this unit beyond its capacity and the decision was made to invest in a more powerful solution. The company had carried out an evaluation of Linux using a small 11-node farm of servers, which proved very encouraging. They also approached a number of other biotechnology companies who had implemented similar solutions to get their input. A number of vendors were approached and, after a series of discussions, it was decided that a solution put forward by specialist Lifesciences partner, Abtech Computer Services UK, based on Hewlett Packard server technology, was the most suitable. The solution is built into two HP 2m Cabinets. The superior heat management of the HP servers has allowed this to happen. With ambitious plans to expand the solution in the future, space is at a premium. The compute farm has how been commissioned and the initial performance has greatly exceeded customer expectations. On the first few test runs the HP solution is already giving a ten-fold increase in performance over the existing farm. Once this server farm is running to capacity, the plan is to bring the total number of CPUs up to 500. This investment will allow the customer to branch out into screening programmes against a wider range of anti-infective drug targets. It should also allow it to develop partnerships with many of the larger pharmaceutical companies that can benefit from using its technology.

The solution was designed by Abtech based on the detailed requirements set out by the customer. It is based on the following items:   Compute Farm 50 Node farm using 1U servers each with Dual Intel Pentium Xeon Processors.   File Server Resilient File Server with Dual 700MHz Pentium Xeon processors (expandable to six processors).   Storage 24 x 36GB hot swap disk drives in external enclosures. These are managed by two HP NetRAID SCSI controllers in the main File Server.   Networking Gigabit Ethernet 12 port Switch with 5 x 24 port 100MB Ethernet Switches connected to dual 100MB LAN ports on each of the Netservers.   Operating Software Red Hat Linux 7.0 Basic Edition on the compute farm and Professional Edition on the file server. "One of the things that impressed us was the fact that HP and Abtech brought a Chemist and a Biologist to the meeting table not just a salesman. We were also very impressed with the management tools that HP bundle with their servers." Spokesman for the Biotech Company