Success with scaling 3x in the cloud for Johnson and Johnson
Cloud computing offers scalability and access to new and innovative technology when you need it, but it comes at a price. You need to be conscious of budgets, resources, and applications as well as jobs and user access, all while battling steep costs and unused, overused, or underused clusters running when they shouldn’t be. Our customers trust our HPC and cloud tools to manage resources cost efficiently. Workload managers like Altair® Grid Engine® work with solutions like Altair® NavOps® to burst to the cloud. NavOps combines automation and cloud spend management to help users manage costs, boost efficiency, and improve time-to-results. But when our cloud computing infrastructure is applied to cutting edge medical research, it is not just about saving our customers money, by reducing the time to science we are also saving people’s lives.
Powering life-changing drug discovery
Johnson & Johnson required on-demand compute capacity at scale, paired with the ability to scale down when resources weren’t needed. With numerous clusters running in the cloud, the HPC team needed a new solution that could replace their open-source Grid Engine and an existing cloud tool that was no longer supported by their cloud vendor of choice. Faced with the complex challenges of accommodating existing systems that had evolved for a decade, unique networking setups, and each cluster having a unique configuration, Johnson & Johnson turned to Altair.
They upgraded from the open-source version to Altair Grid Engine and deployed NavOps to manage their complex cloud deployments, which seamlessly integrated with their cloud vendor. Johnson & Johnson’s requirements were all met: working with automated creation and scaling of clusters, integration and compliance with internal security policies and networking, support for both commercial and homegrown applications, and GXP compliance. The Altair solution has allowed Johnson & Johnson to increase their compute estate by 3x.
“The solution including Altair Grid Engine and NavOps enabled us to scale in the cloud and grow our HPC infrastructure to support critical science and research, including COVID-19 vaccine development.” - Martin Dellwo, Manager, Advanced Computing, Janssen R&D
Check out the article to see how they achieved world-changing results using these tools in some of the newer projects leveraging deep learning for medical advances. It took less than two weeks to implement a cloud bursting solution using Navops with a cost saving of 50% over more naïve on-demand cloud strategies.