Problem addressed

Electronic Drug Discovery is another example of scientific simulation. Developing new (medicinal) drugs takes a very long time. With limited computational resources, the discovery of one promising solution has to wait for another possible solution. Insufficient computational resources form an obstacle for the life science industry.

In this Contrail use case, we look especially at implementing the bioinformatics application Bioconductor in the Cloud. Bioconductor is an open development software project to provide tools for the analysis and comprehension of high throughput genomic data. These types of simulations take vast amounts of data, and use large computational resources. They also require a secure environment.

Contrail solution

This use case is deployed directly on VEP. It uses VEP to ease the management of the VMs and facilitate the deployment of the application with a customized image. Another strong point is the use of XtreemFS for storing the data.

The Contrail platform provides security at all levels (Contrail Security), secure high-availability storage (Contrail XtreemFS), access to large elastic computational resources (Contrail Federation) and an easy application deployment environment.

Expected benefits of using Contrail

Using Contrail will lead to a more robust and flexible simulation tool for Electronic Drug Discovery. This will lower the costs for these types of simulation, and help lowering the time it takes to discover new drugs.