Systems/Enterprise:
GRID POPULARITY IN EUROPE CAUSES
U.S. EXPANSION
United Devices, a market leader in secure grid solutions, announced that
the
company has secured Sanofi-Synthelabo as a key life science customer and has
also established a UK-based office in order to meet growing European demand
for its Enterprise MetaProcessor platform.
The initial deployment at Sanofi-Synthelabo will be utilized to run large
tests using several heterogeneous virtual screening methods to determine which
produce the highest quality results. Future project plans around a more
comprehensive Virtual Screening System will depend on the successful outcome
of these screening tests and would result in a significant expansion of the
current deployment.
"Ease of deployment and the availability of applications were strong
selling
points for us," said Sanofi-Synthelabo Head of Discovery IT, Olivier Gien. "We
also needed proven scalability and security and knew from United Devices'
other enterprise deployments and their work with their public Grid that
massive scaling and security capabilities were already proven."
United Devices' Enterprise MetaProcessor platform allows customers to
efficiently harness existing IT resources as a virtual supercomputer for high-
throughput screening. When evaluating the appropriate technology solution,
Sanofi-Synthelabo chose grid computing over a more expensive cluster solution
in order to avoid heavy IT costs and depreciation of those dedicated assets
while taking advantage of existing resources that will grow into a more
powerful solution over time.
"The fact that France's top pharmaceutical company is using United Devices'
grid software for virtual screening is a good indication that grid technology
is becoming a standard enterprise platform for drug discovery," said United
Devices, Chief Executive Officer, Ed Hubbard.
"Undertaking a first-of-its kind Virtual Screening System,
Sanofi-Synthelabo
is also demonstrating their commitment toward progress."
The Enterprise MetaProcessor platform is an on-site grid computing platform
that unobtrusively enables clusters, servers, desktops and workstations to act
as a processing grid for data-intensive or computationally demanding research
and analysis. The platform's architecture offers industry-leading features in
security, transparency, reliability and manageability. Organizations can
create grids of any scale to accelerate the performance of their business-
critical processing in the most cost-effective manner.
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