Business / Technical Brief

Bringing the power of high-

performance computing to drug
discovery and healthcare

How Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is helping organisations

accelerate drug discovery and modernise healthcare

February 2021
Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
Public

1 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates / Public
 “We processed the
large data sets
obtained by the
microscope on the
cloud in a fraction of
the time and at much
lower cost than
previously possible.
We took a 90-day
Summary process and
completed it in
While the underlying drivers of the pharmaceutical (pharma) industry, such as
an aging population, prevalence of chronic conditions, demand for treatments under five days with
of rare conditions, and emerging novel viruses, remain Oracle Cloud HPC."
strong, the industry is under pressure to change. A core focus for industry
Christopher Woods
transformation is addressing drug development cost structures and EPSRC Research Software
improving development effectiveness. Not only are current processes lengthy Engineer Fellowship
and costly (typically 10 years at a cost of US$2.5 billion to bring one therapy
to market1 ), but the ability to produce “blockbuster” therapies that
compensate organisations sufficiently to cover these massive efforts is now a
top priority. A blockbuster therapy generates annual sales of at least US$1
billion for the company that sells it.
Improving research and development (R&D) productivity is contingent—to a
large extent—on the ability of organisations to collect, organise, analyse, and
interpret data from a wide array of sources beyond traditional clinical studies.
While the value, variety, volume, and veracity of such data is increasing
rapidly, organisations are still struggling to keep pace using conventional
data-management approaches. However, the speed at which organisations
can discover and develop more-ambitious therapies is increasingly important
in achieving competitive advantage, as being first to the market is key.
The time is takes to get a therapy to market can be shortened—even by
several years—by leveraging innovative, cloud-based technologies to
accelerate drug discovery and therapeutic development. Cloud technology is
changing what is possible, especially in data-driven, computationally intensive
R&D processes. Moreover, research projects need secure, robust, reliable, and
scalable infrastructure that can be provisioned quickly. Oracle’s technologies
in high-performance computing (HPC), advanced analytics, artificial
intelligence (AI), and machine learning are core components in transforming
the economics of pharmaceutical R&D productivity.

As unlike first generation cloud vendors, Oracle Gen 2 Cloud has been
architected for security, performance/price and comprehensive end-to-end
SLAs covering performance, availability, manageability of services.

For example, researchers at Flinders University and University of Bristol

turned to Oracle for Research, which supported them and their teams with a
one-year Oracle for Research grant, providing access to Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure and technical advising and collaboration. Flinders University

1 European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries (2013): Estimated full cost of bringing a new chemical or biological entity to market

2 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
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have designed a novel COVID-19 vaccine candidate. The research team
analysed computer models of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and its human
receptor ACE2 to identify how the COVID-19 virus infects human cells at a
pace that was dramatically increased2. In another example, the University of
Bristol recently discovered a synthetic vaccine to the mosquito-borne
chikungunya virus in a fraction of the time and at a much lower cost than
previously thought possible, leveraging on-demand access to a large number
of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure processors3 to perform large scale simulation.

High-throughput screening for top-10, global pharma

company
Oracle for Research is a global community that is working to address
complex problems and drive meaningful change in the world. The
program provides scientists, researchers, and university innovators with
high-value, cost-effective Cloud technologies, participation in Oracle
research user community, and access to Oracle’s technical support
network. Through the program’s free cloud credits, users can leverage
Oracle’s proven technology and infrastructure while keeping research-
developed IP private and secure. Unlock your research possibilities.
Learn more

Rethinking the pharma industry business model

With the emergence of new diseases and the prevalence of hard-to-cure
diseases, pharma organisations continue their relentless pursuit to discover
new drugs. The average time from drug discovery to regulatory approval is
approximately 10 years, and only one out of approximately 5,000 possible
candidate drugs is approved. These data points indicate the high-stakes play
involved in discovery of new therapeutic drugs. It could take between three-
to-five years to discover new candidate drugs that are passed on to the
preclinical stage.
Pharma organisations are examining R&D cost structures in the face of
intensifying demand and directives to save money. On the demand side, the
traditional revenue model is under pressure, as patents of blockbuster drugs
expire, and the likelihood of creating additional blockbuster drugs diminishes.
Furthermore, there is increased competition from generics, biosimilars,
and thin drug therapies with added pressure from reimbursement models
and pricing.

On the cost side, there is the manifestation of Eroom’s law. Eroom's law is the
observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over
time, despite advances in science and technology. If this trend continues, the
expenses for a newly approved drug will reach unprecedented values over the
next few years.

A core tenet to fundamentally changing the economics of drug development

is the adoption of innovative technologies to accelerate and expand drug
discovery and development pipeline. Cloud-based technologies have not only
matured significantly over recent years, they are now indispensable in

2 Flinders University (2020): Flinders targets COV/0-19 vaccine

3 PROFIT (2019): /increasingly, researchers are moving their specialized workloads to the high-performance cloud

3 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
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exploiting data more effectively, helping pharma companies remain
competitive in this quickly changing industry.

Precision medicine and Big data

Precision medicine centres on the possibilities of testing patients for certain
biomarkers and matching them to more individualised and appropriate
treatments. The approach targets therapies to a subgroup of patients, instead
of the traditional one-drug-its-all model. The discipline has advanced rapidly
in recent times, leveraging bioinformatics and related techniques to assist
clinicians in gathering and interpreting big data. Although individual, niche
therapies may fall short of conventional blockbuster status, there is potential
for such drugs to target a range of niche segments to achieve a ‘new’
blockbuster status.
Successful adoption of precision medicine for diagnosis, determining drug
efficacy, and treatment response is not free of problems.
Important consideration needs to be given to storage, backup, analysis, and
interpretation of data, protecting the privacy of the patient, ensuring data
security, and limiting human errors while handling data. Sources of data
include electronic medical records (EMRs), genetic profiles, wearables, and
connected devices. The value, variety, volume, and veracity of data that needs
to be processed is increasing rapidly; however, organisations are struggling to
effectively manage and handle that data with conventional data-management
approaches.

Accelerating drug discovery with HPC and AI

Cloud-based technologies, such as HPC and AI, are increasingly being used
by pharma organisations to probe vast amounts of raw human biological data
to discover new insights into complex clinical causes of human disease and
new opportunities for diagnosis and treatment.
Furthermore, the complexity of R&D processes often requires collaboration
between multiple, global sites, with contract research organisations (CROs),
or through partnerships with other pharma or academic institutions. This
involves data collection, storage, transmittance, management, analysis, and
interpretation.

These complex projects need to ensure that the data is secure, safe, and
handled with a robust, reliable, and scalable infrastructure. Moreover, they
need the ability to easily provision technology, analyse complex information,
and output results in a desirable format for downstream applications.

4 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
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 CORE PHARMA
CLOUD HPC VALUE EXAMPLE OUTCOMES
CHALLENGES

• Accelerate drug • Enable analysis of larger • Drive faster time to value, and
discovery and the quantities of data from clinical reduce time needed to conduct
treatment development studies, DNA, genetic testing, complex network analysis from
process and EMRs, facilitating months to weeks
• Rapidly analyse and discoveries not previously • Conceive more-ambitious projects
possible
interpret data streams not conceivable before cloud-based
derived from clinical • Reverse engineer data-driven HPC, and ask 'bigger' questions
studies models of human disease • Support effective and productive
• Identify new therapies progression and drug
partner collaborations to facilitate
for disease sufferers not responses
quicker outcomes
served by standard • Simulate models to discover
treatments novel drug targets • Put control directly in the hands of
• Match the right • Automate components of the the research teams that consume
treatment(s) to the right end-to-end R&D process HPC infrastructure
patients more effectively • Gain the ability to increase • Focus on strategic priorities and
capacity to meet spikes in HPC outcomes, rather than
activity and reduce waiting managing infrastructure or fighting
times for capital budget on new hardware
• Pay for resources consumed
• Save on cost, which can contribute
only as they are consumed
to more-competitive pricing

Sample use cases in drug discovery and healthcare

Early adopters of Cloud HPC and AI in the industry have already demonstrated
its potential to transform scientific discovery. The applicability and value of
these technologies stems across the Pharma value chain.

5 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
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Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics involves application of computational theories and algorithms
for analysis of biological data. This is a multidisciplinary field, which requires
knowledge of biological sciences, mathematics, information science,
computer science, and statistics.
Genomic sequencing is one of the most-important HPC use cases under the
bioinformatics umbrella. During the past few decades, significant growth in
available computing power has made challenging sequencing problems, such
as whole genome sequencing (WGS), computationally feasible and financially
viable. HPC plays an important role in making WGS feasible, and fuels
advances in high-through-put or next-generation sequencing (NGS).
With NGS it becomes possible to analyse millions of genomic sequences in a
single run. Cloud HPC provides the flexibility to scale up resources and
drastically reduce the time taken to analyse genomic sequence data. Oracle
Cloud Infrastructure supports genomic sequencing libraries, such as, NVIDIA
Clara Parabricks, which take advantage of NVIDIA’s latest-generation graphics
processors to reduce time to results.
Virtual screening
Computational chemistry is a discipline that utilises molecular-level
information from the biological target sites related to a disease, such as
proteins or enzymes, to find the chemical compounds with the potential for
treating the health condition. Computer-aided identification of potential drug
molecules involves a process called virtual screening. A combination of virtual
screening and a computational technique called molecular dynamics
simulation helps in narrowing down the number of candidate drugs from tens
of thousands to hundreds. The computer-aided drug discovery process can
be significantly accelerated by using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure HPC.

Personalised medicine
Personalised medicine identifies the most suitable treatment plan for a patient
based upon genetic information. An example of precision medicine is seen in
cancer treatment where the genomic sequence of tumour cells is used in
identifying the mutation that was responsible for the disease. Identification of
a particular mutation in genomic sequence helps in pinpointing the most-
effective therapeutic regime for treating the disease. The flexibility to scale up
sequencing analysis on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure HPC can help identify the
best treatment plan in less time and improve clinical outcomes through wider
adoption of precision medicine.

Virtual human
Designing medical devices, such as heart valves, stents, and pacemakers,
requires careful consideration of the human body’s interior structure. When it
comes to implanting a device inside a vital organ, there is no room for error.
Imaging modalities, such as, X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans, provide two-
dimensional images of internal organs.
A composite model can be created using these images, which provides a
three-dimensional, virtual representation of the human body. This virtual

6 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
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human provides the flexibility to conduct infinite trials of a medical device
before implanting it inside the body. Measuring the effectiveness of devices is
accelerated by running simulations on the thousands of CPUs that reside in a
cloud HPC cluster.

AI-enabled diagnostics
AI algorithms for computer vision can process images to identify diseases
with high precision, making the work of clinicians easier. It is possible to
implement these AI systems on a large scale by leveraging Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure HPC. Beyond the diagnostic applications, AI algorithms can also
be used in drug discovery where generative algorithms help in designing new
drug molecules that have potential to provide a cure for hard-to-treat
diseases.

Augmented reality/virtual reality surgery

All surgical procedures carry the risk of an adverse outcome—especially
cardiovascular and neurological surgeries. Advances in virtual reality (VR)
technology allow surgeons to rehearse their surgical plan on a realistic, virtual
patient model before entering the operating room to minimise the risks
associated with surgery. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure HPC enables medical
professionals to explore complex structures in a VR environment. Excellent
use of CPU/GPU resources and state-of-the-art networking help in rendering
the VR scenes without any glitches or delays, providing a realistic experience.

Case study 1—Acceleration of powerful vaccine discoveries

University of Bristol
Challenge:
Stop the spread of the infectious, mosquito-borne disease chikungunya that
was spreading throughout the world at an alarming pace. Traditional vaccine
design and production technology resources imped ed innovative vaccine
discoveries.
Approach:
Design a novel vaccine delivery system that is easy to produce in high
volumes.

Use the company’s on-premise supercomputers and leverage the power of

cloud HPC to process very large data sets from the cryo-electron microscope,
which is integral to digital modelling for their pioneering vaccine research.

Output:
Developed a novel, computational approach using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
HPC to create an accurate, high-resolution digital model of their synthetic
vaccine in a fraction of the time and at a much lower cost than previously
thought possible.
Envisaged a vaccine delivery system from a lab-produced, thermostable,
protein molecule that could be readily manufactured at low cost and does not
require refrigeration to retain viability.

7 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
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Case study 2—High-throughput screening of potential
candidate molecules

Top 10 Pharma Co.

Challenge:
NVIDIA Parabricks
Improve screening throughput of its potential candidate molecules. The
company was achieving one million molecules in about 24 hours using their
available on Oracle
in-house HPC cluster. Cloud Infrastructure,
which can cut
Approach:
analysis time from
Create a proof of concept to run the pharma company’s open source–based
30 hours to just
screening process through HPC on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a
comparison to their in-house HPC cluster. under one hour.
Core Oracle solutions include Oracle HPC (VM and bare metal), Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure Object Storage, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container
Engine for Kubernetes running Redis Database and SLURM Workload
Manager.
Output:
Oracle was able to improve screening productivity from one million molecules
in 24 hours to one million molecules in seven minutes and 25 seconds (at a
cost of US$48).

Oracle’s heritage in health sciences and emerging

technologies
Oracle has been serving the health sciences industry with emerging
technologies for nearly 40 years. Oracle’s comprehensive solutions for health
sciences help address the ever-increasing need to collect, manage, analyse,
and collaborate on data. These technologies help researchers spend less time
building, deploying, maintaining, analysing, and securing IT, and more time
interpreting, discovering, and collaborating.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generation 2
Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud enables organisations to run any workload at any time
over an infrastructure that matches and surpasses the performance, control,
and governance of institutional data centres while delivering the scale,
elasticity, and cost savings of public clouds.

High availability across multiple regions, availability domains, and fault

domain configurations that are non-oversubscribed.

High-performance with high-frequency cores, specialty-compute instances

and 100 Gbps networking for remote direct memory access (RDMA). OCI’s
RDMA network allows customers to configure compute nodes into a high
bandwidth ultra-low latency network that can go as low as 1.5 µs.

High scalability with autoscaling to adjust resources up and down

automatically in response to changing demands.

Oracle Gen 2 Cloud offers the latest, high-end components, support for third-
party and open-source technologies, unique support for hybrid and multi-
cloud strategies, and an unwavering commitment to protect sensitive data. It's

8 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
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a security-first architecture with workload isolation at all levels of networking,
storage, and compute, with no over-provisioning of services at any point,
giving customers uniformly high and predictable performance with service-
level agreements for all workloads at any given time. This also gives Oracle a
highly advantageous cloud cost model, where, simply put, faster is cheaper.

Integrated data platform architecture with HPC

Why HPC is better on Oracle than other clouds

HPC is the key enabler for innovation and delivering leading-edge products
and services. However, access to HPC has not always been simple and cost
effective. High cost and capital requirements act as a barrier to both small and
large pharma organisations, to realise the possible, to evolve the next.

Oracle HPC sources of value

ORACLE
DETAIL
DIFFERENTIATOR

Latest in compute • Run your HPC workloads on next-

hardware
generation hardware (NVIDIA, AMD, and
Intel).
• Get on-premise levels of performance and
control using dedicated bare metal
instances.

9 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
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 • Get better price-performance than with Our growing
other cloud vendors. (E.g. Oracle is typically collaboration with
44 percent less expensive than Amazon Oracle is fuelling
Web Services for Computational Fluid
incredible
Dynamics (CFD) workloads for Ansys Fluent
CFD workloads)
innovations across a
wide range of
Scalable, independent • Get 6.4 TB of local NVMe flash storage. industries and uses.
instances, more than • Get extreme, low-latency storage for By integrating
any storage
shared-nothing architectures or fast, local NVIDIA’s new A100
scratch storage. Tensor Core GPUs
• Leverage elastic block storage volumes for into its cloud service
additional storage that can provide up to 32 offerings, Oracle is
TB each and up to 35,000 IOPS per volume, giving innovators
backed by performance service-level everywhere access to
agreements. breakthrough
• Choose from wide set of parallel file computing
systems that can be deployed in performance to
three clicks. accelerate their most
critical work in AI,
Specialised network • Achieve 100 Gbps network throughput with machine learning,
latency under 1.5 microseconds with
data analytics and
secure, dedicated RDMA over converged
high-performance
Ethernet (RoCE) v2.
• Scale up to 20,000 cores in a single RDMA computing.”
cluster with latency as low as 1.5 microsec. Ian Buck
• Access compute clusters fast with non- Vice President and General

oversubscribed flat network with dual 25 Manager of Accelerated

Gbps bandwidth. Easily move your existing Computing, NVIDIA

network topology to the cloud with virtual

cloud networks.

• Leverage the only cloud with network

performance service-level agreements.

Conclusion
The pharmaceutical industry is facing unprecedented pressures. A core focus
for organisations is to address R&D cost structures and improve discovery and
development efficiency and effectiveness. At the heart of achieving this is the
acquisition and analysis of data and its subsequent transformation into
actionable insight. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure HPC is a key enabler to
improving the economics of pharmaceutical R&D. It requires fewer
prototypes, accelerates testing, and decreases time to market. The technology
is callable on demand, suitable for any HPC workload, based on the most
advanced compute, storage, networking, and software technologies, and
allows pharma companies to pay for only what they use.

10 White Paper / Bringing the power of high-performance computing to drug discovery and healthcare
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Moreover, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure HPC fits within a wider set of
cloud-based digital platforms and can integrate any data sources into a
comprehensive data platform that supports AI and machine learning to
deliver business value. Data that had previously been locked in silos can now
be released and given a voice to help drive better outcomes across the R&D
value chain—from discovering data sources and analysing, transforming, and
reining them to getting the analysis and insight to empower decision-making.
As unlike first generation cloud vendors, Oracle Gen 2 Cloud has been
architected for security, performance/price and comprehensive SLAs
throughout, which is why organisations are now turning to Oracle.
The pharma industry now has the opportunity to add tremendous value and
be at the heart of the simulated, digital patient journey. However, as with
many other disrupted industries, the success of individual players will hinge
on the speed at which they can transform themselves to meet the new market
reality.

Why move HPC workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Gain performance that matches and even exceeds on-premises
deployments

Complete simulations, renderings, and AI training fast with the

highest-performing IaaS among public clouds

Scale infrastructure up and down quickly, and pay only for the
resources that you use

Pay for compute-intensive workloads as predictable operational

expenses, and avoid massive capital expenditures

Focus on your simulations and renderings—not on keeping up with

the latest hardware and software

Watch the video on YouTube, Oracle Unlocks HPC.

Discover High Performance Computing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

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Appendix: Examples of successful HPC projects with Oracle

Flinders University identifies candidate for Covid-19 vaccine

Australian researchers are testing a vaccine candidate against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus responsible for the
COVID-19 pandemic. Supported with a one-year Oracle for Research grant, the research team is worked to
accelerate vaccine discoveries with Oracle Cloud technology and vaccine technology developed by local
company Vaxine Pty Ltd. They used computer models of the spike protein and its human receptor, ACE2, to
identify how the virus was infecting human cells, and then were able to design a vaccine to block this process.

"The team has exploited the very latest technologies, including AI,
advanced manufacturing, and Cloud computing to accelerate vaccine
design, shaving years off normal development timeframes."4
Professor Petrovsky, Flinders University Professor and Research Director at Vaxine

Bristol, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Oracle join forces against
tropical disease
Scientists from University of Bristol and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) have
identified a candidate synthetic vaccine against the tropical disease Chikungunya.

"We processed the large data sets obtained by the microscope on the
cloud in a fraction of the time and at much lower cost than previously
possible. We took a 90-day process and completed it in under five days
with Oracle Cloud HPC."
Christopher Woods, EPSRC Research Software Engineer Fellowship

Altair runs complex simulations on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Altair HyperWorks Unlimited Virtual Appliance is a fully managed engineering service that provides modelling
and visualization software, solvers, and postprocessing tools—all on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. They have
achieved 25 percent better price-performance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure versus other cloud providers.

"We went looking for the best price-performance, and we found that in
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure."
Sam Mahalingam, Chief Technical Officer for Enterprise Solutions, Altair Engineering

4
https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2020/04/03/flinders-targets-covid-19-vaccine/

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Gridmarkets run molecular simulations with Brigham Young University, Texas A&M University
Researchers use X-ray diffraction and 3D molecular-modelling software to build a crystal structure of the virus
that causes COVID-19. Using Oracle HPC, the animation rendering platform can render complex molecular
models in less than 24 hours.

"We don't own or maintain any hardware, and we're paying 70 percent
less to spin up an instance on Oracle Cloud infrastructure than we did
running workloads on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud,"
said GridMarkets Cofounder Mark Ross.

Manchester Metropolitan University and NHS use AI to identify diabetic foot wounds
Manchester-based app Footsnaps AI, supported by Oracle for Research, can identify diabetic foot ulcers and
associated pathologies and provide feedback within 20 seconds using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. With an
amputation rate 36 percent above the UK national average, Footsnaps AI used deep learning to provide near
real-time medical feedback as well as reduce foot-ulcer-related visits by an expected 50 percent.

“Understanding the treatment of ulceration and whether these wounds

are getting better or worse is essentially pattern recognition. Further,
the real breakthrough will come if we -health professionals and
patients -can identify these wounds much earlier and therefore initiate
much more timely treatment. This is where artificial intelligence is
potentially a game changer,"
says Naseer Ahmad, Consultant Vascular Surgeon at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust.

Elem Biotech creates virtual humans to aid clinical trials

ELEM generates 3D models of human organs from patient scans to provide an almost unlimited virtual clinical
trials platform. Thanks to the simulation engine and the cloud database, it is possible, for example, to simulate
obstructive lung diseases or to replicate the functioning of pacemakers, valve replacements, stents, anti-
arrhythmic drugs, and treatments for asthma or drug pumps.

"Our virtual humans, which reduce animal and human testing, as well as
product cost and time to market, are created in the Oracle Cloud
infrastructure, where medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical
companies, and researchers can analyze their products and optimize
treatments to better meet patient needs,"
said Christopher Morton, CEO of ELEM Biotech.

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Gromacs simulates the movements of atoms in biomolecules
Gromacs is a molecular dynamics software that simulates the movements of atoms in
biomolecules under a predefined set of conditions. It is used to identify the behaviour of
these biomolecules when exposed to changes in temperature, pressure, and other inputs
that mimic the actual conditions encountered in a living organism. Gromacs can be used to
establish patterns in protein folding, protein-ligand binding, and cell-membrane transport,
making it a very useful application for drug research and discovery.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure gets behind world's fastest supercomputer

RIKEN is the owner of the world’s fastest HPC supercomputer known as Fugaku. RIKEN
has chosen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as the public cloud provider for its elastic HPC
storage and to enable universities and research organizations to connect securely and
cost-effectively through the Science Information Network (SINET). Oracle was chosen
because of its superior performance, enterprise-grade security, and elastic storage
resources as part of the ongoing initiative to promote wider use of the supercomputer.

University of Oxford combines telecoms and healthcare data to model pandemic

University of Oxford turned to Oracle for Research and the power of Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure Data Science to model the UK’s COVID-19 exit strategy and economic
recovery. The work brings together mobile phones, social media, and demographics into
single data platform. The result is the ability to understand population movement as an
indicator of virus transmission at a local level with up to two metres of accuracy.

Using this big data at different geographical levels, the team can predict capacity
pressures on hospitals based on population movement in the local communities that they serve, predict
where it may be possible to ease social distancing measures at the regional and local levels, and monitor
which areas of the country are re-opening for business and which are not.

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