Taashee Provides Lupin with a reliable, flexible, and high-performance infrastructure for its critical drug research software

Created by Dhiraj on Sat, 12/31/2011 - 13:41

Fast Facts:

Company: Lupin Limited

Red Hat Implementation Partner: Taashee Linux Services

Industry: Pharmaceutical Industry

Geography: Pan India

Business Challenge: To build a high performance software infrastructure for the Schrödinger's molecular modeling and simulation software which is critical for Lupin's pharmaceutical drug discovery research

Solution: Developed a high performance computing infrastructure based on a combination of Red Hat and IBM solutions, including Red Hat HPC Suite and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux - Advanced Platform 5.4, Red Hat HPC Suite, Schrödinger software for molecular modeling and simulations.

Hardware: Intel dual quad-core processor-based servers from IBM, IBM Blade Servers with 3 blades

Benefits: High performance and high reliability of operating environment, increased flexibility to utilize variety of hardware platforms and no vendor lock-in, decreased IT costs, simplified management, increased stability and risk management

BACKGROUND:

Lupin Limited is an innovation led transnational pharmaceutical company producing a wide range of quality, affordable generic and branded formulations and APIs for the developed and developing markets of the world. Dr. Desh Bandhu Gupta’s vision and dream to fight life threatening infectious diseases and manufacture drugs of highest national priority led to the formation of Lupin in the year 1968. His vision, his inimitable commitment and verve have steered Lupin to achieving the distinction of becoming one of the fastest growing Generic players globally.

Lupin first gained recognition when it became one of the world’s largest manufacturers of Tuberculosis drugs. Over the years, the Company has moved up the value chain and has not only mastered the business of intermediates and APIs, but has also leveraged its strengths to build a formidable formulations business globally. Lupin’s world class manufacturing facilities, spread across India and Japan, have played a critical role in enabling the company to realize its global aspirations. Going forward, the company would continue to focus on identifying and developing niche segments, a differentiated product portfolio in all its chosen markets backed up by strategic partnerships and in-licensing, and investment in new areas such as biosimilars - well on-course to becoming a top 10 global generics powerhouse.

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“Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a reliable, efficient, and robust solution and therefore represents the most suitable and cost-effective option for high-performance environments. Red Hat platform helps us to conceptualize our research faster and execute a faster go-to-market strategy for our pharmaceutical products.”

- Bhavesh Shah, Manager – Information Technology Infrastructure, Lupin Limited

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BUSINESS CHALLENGE:

Lupin’s research and development team based out of Indian city of Pune use software for molecular modeling and simulations from a product firm called Schrödinger. Schrödinger’s software provides accurate, reliable, and high performance computational technology to solve real-world problems in life science research. The predictive power of Schrödinger's software allows scientists to accelerate their research and development activities, reduce research costs, and make novel discoveries that might otherwise not be possible. Schrödinger's software is resource intensive as it requires higher CPU and memory bandwidth for smooth functioning. “The software runs smoothly in high performance environments,” said Bhavesh Shah, Manager – IT Infrastructure, Lupin.

The scientists’ productivity is directly proportional to the functioning of the software. In Lupin, unfortunately, the software was facing a lot of performance issues in its functioning. “The software was running on desktop machines of respective scientists hampering its performance,” said Bhavesh. The processing time required for modeling and simulation tasks used to touch as high as five hours. This in turn was hampering the productivity and performance of the scientists. “We needed an operating platform which can create a high performance environment to support the functioning of the critical Schrödinger's software,” said Bhavesh.

SOLUTION:

While choosing an appropriate operating system platform for building the desired infrastructure to support the Schrödinger's software, Lupin’s IT team prioritized Linux as the operating system of choice. “We recognized the fact that scientific application software predominantly runs on Linux,” said Bhavesh. For building the Linux based infrastructure, Lupin’s IT team chose Red Hat as its trusted technology partner and decided to build its infrastructure based on Red Hat HPC Suite running on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Red Hat’s HPC solution was an ideal fit as it met the criteria of cost, high performance, reliability, and stability.

Lupin IT also decided to work with Red Hat as the open source vendor. “Red Hat as the world's open source leader was the obvious choice,” said Bhavesh. Additionally, the scientists who were the end users of the system had a decent expertise on using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat's subscription model also provided Lupin with a predictable total cost of ownership (TCO) while implementing the solution.

The implementation was done by Taashee Linux Services, a Red Hat partner organization in India. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat HPC Suite provide sound software foundation for the underlying IBM hardware platform,” said Abhishek Datt, Chief Technology Officer, Taashee Linux Services. The installation was performed on IBM Blade-center infrastructure with one master node and two compute nodes. After this, Schrödinger application for molecular modeling was installed and tested for performance.

Currently, the Schrödinger software is running in a high performance environment over Red Hat HPC Suite based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4. The software infrastructure is running on IBM Blade server hardware with three blades. The installation and configuration was very smooth and rapid. “The Red Hat HPC Suite is easy to configure. The entire set up was up and running in a matter of just two days,” said Bhavesh. The performance of the system has improved multifold and there has been no incidence of unplanned downtime since the implementation.

In future, the IT team wants scale the Schrödinger software system which is currently running on three blades to five blades. “With that, we hope to improve the system’s performance even better,” said Bhavesh.

BENEFITS:

“With Red Hat HPC Suite, we were able to extract tremendous value from Schrödinger software system,” said Bhavesh. “Red Hat freed us from vendor lock-in, and enabled the organization to choose a cost effective commodity hardware platforms that delivered flexibility and high performance,” he added. Lupin was also benefited by Red Hat's robust certified ecosystem with the industry's leading software and hardware manufacturers. This broad certified ecosystem provides Lupin with added flexibility in selecting software and hardware solutions in the future.

Red Hat solutions also provided Lupin with lower IT costs, simplified management, reduced systems maintenance, and increased scalability and performance. “Red Hat solutions offer much easier manageability compared to other similar solutions,” said Bhavesh. The solution is also highly reliable due to robust and stable underlying platform of Red Hat HPC Suite.

Red Hat HPC Suite implementation significantly improved the cost-to-performance ratio of the solution. Additionally, the performance of the system has improved enormously.

Overall, Red Hat provided Lupin with high performance cluster solutions at an affordable price without any compromise on performance and reliability. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a reliable, efficient, and robust solution and therefore represents the most suitable and cost-effective option for high-performance environments,” said Bhavesh.

ABOUT TAASHEE:

Taashee Linux Services, based in India, provides expert high-‐end technology solutions to mid-‐to large-‐scale businesses. With decades of collective experience, Taashee takes on the most innovative IT developments, including virtualization, clustering, cloud computing, monitoring, and security.

Taashee Linux Services is a group of light minded technologist working as a team for solving the complex problems by using the simplicity of Open Source Softwares for majority of our customers.More

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