Eli Lilly: The Future of Pharmaceutical Research and Cloud Computing

3/27/11 10:50 AM

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Eli Lilly: The Future of Pharmaceutical Research and Cloud Computing

Posted April 1, 2009 by Jasmine Antonick
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Yesterday we introduced you to Pfizers Web 2.0 powerhouse, Stephen Jordan whos the force behind Pfizers open approach to idea sharing and management as well as their SaaS strategy. Today, meet David Powers, 13-year veteran at Eli Lilly who is using cloud computing services to support scientists with on-demand processing power and storage: Eli Lilly On Whats Next In Cloud Computing * originally posted on InformationWeeks Plug Into The Cloud (by John Foley) Eli Lilly uses Amazon Web Services and other cloud services to provide high-performance computing, as needed, to hundreds of its scientists. With AWS, Powers said, a new server can be up and running in three minutes (it used to take Eli Lilly seven and a half weeks to deploy a server internally) and a 64-node Linux cluster can be online in five minutes (compared with three months internally). The deployment time is really what impressed us, Powers said. Its just shy of instantaneous. Looking ahead, Powers foresees the possibility of using cloud services from a half dozen different vendors, and he wants to head off a scenario where Eli Lilly has to configure and manage each of those separately. He describes the need for an orchestration layer that sits between Eli Lilly and the various cloud services to which it subscribes. That layer, provided by an intermediary company and not Eli Lilly itself, would comprise algorithms that determine the best cloud service for a particular job based on lowest cost, highest performance, or other requirement. Such an approach would make it possible for Eli Lilly and other users to write to a single API rather than many, while optimizing service usage. He also talks about the potential to use cloud computing for external collaboration. Eli Lilly already is doing
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Eli Lilly: The Future of Pharmaceutical Research and Cloud Computing

3/27/11 10:50 AM

some of this, but Powers envisions going further, to the point where the cloud becomes a point of integration between Eli Lilly and outside researchers. We have work going on right now that starts to fit into this collaborative scheme, he said. * To hear more about what Eli Lilly is doing with cloud computing, register to attend Under the Radar: Clarity in the Cloud on April 24 in Mountain View, CA.

How to be a SysAdmin Rock Star | Cloud Chomp

April 1st, 2009
[...] David Powers. He used to run High Performance Computing clusters at Lilly, and found that with the cloud: a new server can be up and running in three minutes (it used to take Eli Lilly seven and a half weeks to deploy a server internally) and a 64-node Linux cluster can be online in five minutes (compared with three months internally). He now works at Cycle Computing, accelerating protein sequencing research for all. [...]

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Eli Lilly: The Future of Pharmaceutical Research and Cloud Computing

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