Fortune 500 Company Seeks to Revolutionize Their Research with Supercharged Computing
Discover how FP Complete transformed pharmacodynamic research with high-performance computing solutions, delivering innovative results to their client’s R&D team.
Our client had exhausted their internal IT resources and was frustrated by the lack of progress from external vendors, so they turned to FP Complete for a comprehensive solution that included:
- Large but extremely variable compute capacity across many months.
- Clarity and maintainability of specialized code to assist regulators
- A near-supercomputer level of performance
Corporation Type
US-based Fortune 500 company
Industry
Pharmaceuticals
Project Type
Regulated software medical device
Business Issues
- Client needed significantly more computing power to process complex equations and analyze millions of data points.
- Client needed demonstrable correctness of the source code that would satisfy regulatory compliance requirements.
- Client needed increased scalability and maintainability.
- Client needed a technology services provider with superior scientific and mathematical knowledge.
Project Outcome
Massive Increase in Processing Power
The system massively increased the output of the customer’s scientific model, scaling it from a desktop implementation to a 360-CPU virtual supercomputer available as a Web service
Project Outcome
Accelerated Experimentation
Our solution delivered vast amounts of computation to the R&D team, completing ultra-detailed statistical and probability analyses of a large clinical data set. This new data led the team to identify pertinent mediating factors previously unknown to clinicians. They used this knowledge to improve the model and used on-demand cloud deployment to test and retest improved models in a very short cycle time.
Project Outcome
Safe and Effective Software with Significant Power
The completed and scaled-up system achieved significant power, far exceeding any previous predictive model of this molecule’s effects on individual patients. The resulting software is so safe and effective and contains such strong engineering controls that the customer is preparing a regulatory submission to use it in a clinical medical device.
TECHNOLOGY USED
Amazon Cloud, Redis, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Haskell
FP Complete’s Solution
- Our strategy was to deploy the model on a cloud of 36-core virtual compute servers, automatically increasing the number of machines as needed.
- By utilizing a high-performance computing system based on Redis, a streamlined coding database, we achieved a considerable increase in processing power through a diverse distribution of computations.
- We accelerated experimentation by configuring container software – including Docker and Kubernetes – to launch whole clusters automatically.
- Separate on-demand systems could be utilized for research, test, and production runs to accommodate various versions of the model.
- The clusters were separated into their own virtual private cloud (VPC), each with subnets to increase performance and provide redundancy.
- The four subnets were:
- a web application programming interface (API) tier,
- a Redis utility tier to allow applications, systems, and services to communicate with each other,
- a distributed computing tier to run multiple simultaneous instances of the mathematical models, and
- a tier for system management and monitoring.
NEW CHALLENGES FOR FP COMPLETE
- Some of the data sets used by our client contained Personalized Health Information (PHI), which is regulated by various privacy laws (e.g., HIPAA) and is subject to increased regulatory oversight.
- To avoid using PHI, we designed the API so that users could submit only anonymized data to the online system.
- The system became so popular within the Customer’s R&D group that there were many demands for many system versions, trying out various new analysis techniques. The resulting high DevOps workload to deploy new systems began to slow new research work.
- In response to this newfound need, we implemented containerization with Docker and automation through Kubernetes, enabling the easy creation of test systems in the cloud whenever necessary.
The Conclusion
FP Complete has revolutionized its customer’s pharmacodynamic research by providing high-performance computing solutions that deliver innovative results to the client’s R&D team. Their cutting-edge technology and expertise have enabled them to transform how research is conducted, and data is analyzed, allowing faster and more accurate results.
By leveraging FP Complete’s services, this pharmaceutical company gained a competitive edge in the market and accelerated its drug research efforts. FP Complete’s commitment to excellence and innovation makes them a valuable partner for any organization looking to stay ahead of the curve.