In pharmaceutical design, working with the smallest molecular structures creates some of the largest computing workloads. This comes from the need to parse massive amounts of algorithmic chemistry calculations to help discover and develop new drugs. Over the past year, Cloud Pharmaceuticals became more efficient, in both time and cost, thanks to the power and flexibility of the ProfitBricks cloud. 

North Carolina-based Cloud Pharmaceuticals designs new drugs and drug candidates, accelerating the developmental process using cloud computing technology in place of traditional, expensive and slow on-premises infrastructure. In 2014, Cloud Pharmaceuticals migrated to ProfitBricks, the leading provider of painless cloud infrastructure, in pursuit of the perfect balance of power and efficiency for its pharmaceutical design teams, and has since seen a reduction in cloud computing costs of 45 per cent.

"We needed a cloud that would provide the best price for our variable, spiky workloads of massive high-performance computing," said Bill Shipman, Director of Cloud Computing at Cloud Pharmaceuticals. "In contrast to other cloud providers' complicated and costly pricing models, ProfitBricks' flexible price structure, with minute-based billing, has resulted in significant cost savings - without sacrificing the HPC-like performance that we need for the best results."

Cloud Pharmaceuticals runs a custom platform, with known and proprietary algorithms and high-performance computing batch schedulers on top of hundreds of virtual machines in ProfitBricks' virtual data centers. The batch systems running include Slurm, with most automation coded in Python against the ProfitBricks REST API.

The developer-friendly REST API, in addition to the flexibility of ProfitBricks' cloud infrastructure and a highly responsive support team, have all contributed to Cloud Pharmaceuticals' painless cloud experience.

"Like so many of our customers, Cloud Pharmaceuticals has taken full advantage of ProfitBricks' ability to provide highly flexible and scalable compute resources on demand, while only paying for what they use," said Achim Weiss, CEO and co-founder, ProfitBricks. "This, combined with our growing suite of development tools such as our REST API, enables the infrastructure to be managed through automation and further expedites workloads with ProfitBricks."

As part of his talk, ‘Getting it Done: Why, How & What Two Companies Are Doing on the Cloud', Achim Weiss will be giving an in-depth look at the Cloud Pharmaceuticals case study at Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA on Wednesday, November 4^th at 3:40pm. For the full case study on Cloud Pharmaceuticals and ProfitBricks, please visit https://www.profitbricks.com/press-and-info-center/case-studies