Pfizer selects Blackstone for genomics supercomputing solution



Blackstone provided the hardware and software for the compute-farm, which is a high-throughput, high-performance distributed supercomputing solution that runs on the Linux operating system and features Intel-based processors. The company also is providing Pfizer with technologies and services to support the company's program designed to establish priorities among thousands of genomics-based drug research targets.

According to Blackstone, many pharmaceutical companies are turning to compute-farm distributed supercomputing architectures, instead of mainframes, because compute-farms are designed to provide equal computing power to speed time-to-discovery, for lower initial cost and lower incremental scalability cost.

Under the terms of the agreement Blackstone will provide Pfizer with its browser-based SmartWatch software, designed to monitor compute-farm utilization and performance, identify bottlenecks and ensure maximum resource usage. The company has future plans to incorporate two additional tools: Blackstone's SmartCache, a data management tool which reduces network bottlenecks common to data-intensive applications by using a peer-to-peer technology to replicate, distribute and update data on local compute nodes, and Blackstone's SmartBlast tool, designed for distributing BLAST execution over a cluster of computers by segmenting target databases, avoiding disk swapping and reducing total memory costs.