Elastic high-performance computing on the cloud, supporting the rapid development of the life science industry, reducing costs and increasing efficiency

Introduction: The research of life science has long been inseparable from the assistance of High Performance Computing (HPC). From computer-aided drug design, vaccine research and development, to genetic data processing and analysis, to providing precision medical services for tumor treatment, prenatal screening and other medical technologies, HPC plays a very important role in life science research. And how can the cloud help the development of the industry and help the industry reduce costs and increase efficiency?

With the maturity of cloud computing technology services and practices, more and more industries have realized the transformation and upgrading of the entire industry through cloud computing, and the life sciences industry, which is in its golden age, is no exception.

As an industry with high data volume and high computing volume, life science research has long been inseparable from the assistance of high performance computing (High Performance Computing), from computer-aided drug design, vaccine research and development, to providing precision medical services through genetic testing, Prenatal screening, etc., high-performance computing HPC plays a very important role in life science research.

As the No. 1 cloud vendor in China, Alibaba Cloud's global infrastructure and fast, flexible, secure, and efficient cloud computing services are the best choice for life science enterprises to go to the cloud.

At present, 80% of the solutions for the life science industry are offline IDC supercomputing cluster solutions. With the continuous evolution of genomics, biopharmaceutical technology and the continuous development of computer science, traditional computer cluster resources can no longer meet the needs of the life science industry and technology. Evolution requirements generally face the pain points of poor scalability, performance bottlenecks, and difficult management and maintenance. At the same time, they also hope to embrace public cloud architecture and use new technologies such as heterogeneous computing and artificial intelligence.

Alibaba Cloud believes that high-performance computing on the cloud is the best way to build and use HPC. In response to the relevant needs of the life science industry, Alibaba Cloud provides high-performance computing public cloud solutions, hybrid cloud solutions, large-memory instance performance optimization solutions, containerized solutions, Pharmaceutical AI solutions, etc., can cover and solve the needs of different scenarios in the industry, and have the following advantages:

1. Rich computing power : Alibaba Cloud operates 27 public cloud regions and 84 availability zones on four continents around the world; the automatic scaling capability on the cloud supports scheduling across data centers to meet the requirements of large-scale parallel jobs. The type of computing resources can also be determined according to the scheduler Flexible queue configuration supports heterogeneous computing power of multiple specifications, as well as large-memory, high-frequency and other specifications of CPU instances;
2. Elastic cost reduction: Alibaba Cloud's elastic high-performance computing E-HPC platform can dynamically create/delete computing nodes, flexibly configure scaling policies, and flexibly charge according to actual load. quality and speed;
3. Minimalist operation and maintenance : fully compatible with HPC services, automatically build clusters, provide job performance analysis, locate hotspots based on dimensions such as clusters, instances, and processes, support visual output of job reports, and provide consumption components in dimensions such as users, tasks, and queues;
4. New technology empowerment : At the IaaS layer, Alibaba Cloud continuously iterates the latest computing power. SaaS and PaaS have hundreds of third-party partners to integrate Alibaba Cloud, allowing life science companies to quickly obtain relevant technical services. Alibaba Cloud's rich ecosystem and continuous iterative technical capabilities on the cloud help enterprises enjoy full-process technical services and the latest technology dividends.

Alibaba Cloud high-performance computing is currently widely used in industrial simulation (CAD/CAE), chip design (EDA), biomedical materials, energy exploration, and public services.

Shenshi Technology uses the cost optimization strategy of elastic supply, combined with the price of preemptive instances, to complete the delivery of massive resources at 30% of the cost. At the same time, the E-HPC automatic operation and maintenance feature of elastic high-performance computing on the cloud reduces the operation and maintenance cost of Shenshi Technology and improves the efficiency of cluster management.

Shengting Medical, a life medicine company, optimized the data reliability, operation and maintenance cost and efficiency of traditional IDC clusters by going to the cloud, and the efficiency of gene comparison and analysis was increased by 70%. Alibaba Cloud's high-performance computing team also reduces the waste of ineffective computing resources and effectively reduces the cost of use by combining the Slurm business workflow dependency and automatic scaling.

In the "Alibaba Cloud Life Science Best Practices" program on Alibaba Cloud's official website, four experts from Alibaba Cloud will show you how Alibaba Cloud helps the development of the life science industry from the perspective of the current status of the life science industry, solutions and application cases. Welcome to click on the special page below to watch.

https://developer.aliyun.com/topic/life\_science\_best\_practice

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