
Case History
Novartis

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN PHARMA
High Performance Computing for Vaccine Research
Requirements
Configuration of a highly customized system for parallel computing
Solution
Design of a fast compute HPC cluster with storage suitable for parallel computing and Infiniband interconnection
APPLICATION
HPC, Innovation and Research in Pharma
KNOW-HOW
Technical competence, Cluster management, Support
ADVANTAGES
Improved performance and service continuity, enterprise level high reliability
Novartis is among the world leaders in the development of innovative drugs in the main therapeutic areas, in the production and marketing of generics and biosimilars. These businesses are part of two divisions: Innovative Medicines (comprising the Novartis Pharmaceuticals and Novartis Oncology Business Units) and Sandoz. Novartis is the largest clinical research investor in Italy, with an investment of € 80 million in R&D in 2019.
During the research activities related to the development of vaccines, the customer needed to manage a large amount of data, in the Next-Gen Sequencing field, that is the series of technologies that allows to sequence large genomes in a short time, of the order of weeks. It also required very high performance and near zero risk of failure during parallel computing operations. E4 therefore provided an HPC cluster with high reliability characteristics (96 dual socket servers for a total of 1,152 cores); a high-performance storage for parallel computing; and Infiniband interconnection to ensure ultra-high performance and low latency.
To the implementation of the highly customized system to respond to customer needs, E4 has also added support service with remote cluster monitoring. Thanks to this operation, E4 guarantees the customer constant operation of the system and continuous systems support.